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OVER THERE 

ARNOLD BENNETT 



By ARNOLD BENNETT 



NOVELS 

THESE TWAIN 

CLAYHANGER 

HILDA LESSWAYS 

THE OLD wives' TALE 

DENRY THE AUDACIOUS 

THE OLD ADAM 

HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND 

THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS 

THE BOOK OF CARLOTTA 

BURIED ALIVE 

A GREAT MAN 

LEONORA 

WHOM GOD HATH JOINED 

A MAN FROM THE NORTH 

ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS 

THE GLIMPSE 

THE CITY OF PLEASURE 

THE GRAND BABYLON HOTEL 

HUGO 

THE GATES OF WRATH 

POCKET PHILOSOPHIES 

THE author's CRAFT 

MARRIED LIFE 

FRIENDSHIP AND HAPPINESS 

HOW TO LIVE ON 24 HOURS A DAY 

THE HUMAN MACHINE 

LITERARY TASTE 

MENTAL EFFICIENCY 

PLAYS 

THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
CUPID AND COMMONSENSE 
WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS 
POLITE FARCES 
MILESTONES 
THE HONEYMOON 

MISCELLANEOUS 

paris nights 

the truth about an authoit 

liberty! 

OVER there: war SCENES 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 







BOMBARDMENT OF RHEIMS CATHEDRAL 



"But the Cathedral stands, high above the level of 
disaster, a unique target, and a target successfully 
defiant." [Page 68] 



OVER THERE 

War Scenes On The 
Western Front 



BY 

ARNOLD BENNETT 

ACTHOE OF "PARIS NIGHTS," "THE OLD WIVES' TALE," ETC. 



WITH DRAWINGS BY WALTEE HALE 




GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



y 



5aA 

3^ 



Copyright, 1915, by 
The Curtis Publishing Company 



Copyright, 1915, oy 
George H. Doran Company 



V^ 



NOV 15 1915 

©CU414595 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Zone of Pakis 3 

II. On the French Front 33 

III. E-uiNS 63 

IV. At Grips 95 

V. The British Lines 123 

VI. The Unique City 155 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

BoMBAEDMENT OF Rheims Cathedhal . FroTitispiece 

PAGE 

The Church at Bethany 20 

The Ruined Nave of Soissons Cathedral. . 50 

Interior of Arras Cathedral Bombarded 

AND on Fire 80 

Ruins of the Hotel de Ville, Arras 110 

Shell Fire over Ablain St. Nazaire 140 

The Tower of the Cloth Hall, Ypres 170 



CHAPTER ONE 
THE ZONE OF PARIS 



CHAPTER I 

THE ZONE OF PARIS 

From the balcony you look down upon 
massed and variegated tree-tops as though 

you were looking down upon a 
THE valley forest from a mountain 
ESCAPE height. Those trees, whose hidden 

trunks make alleys and squares, 
are rooted in the history of France. On 
the dusty gravel of the promenade which 
runs between the garden and the street a 
very young man and a girl, tiny figures, are 
playing with rackets at one of those second- 
rate ball games beloved by the French petite 
bourgeoisie. Their jackets and hats are hung 
on the corner of the fancy wooden case in 
which an orange-tree is planted. They are 
certainly perspiring in the heavy heat of the 
early morning. They are also certainly in 
love. This lively daUiance is the preliminary 
to a day's desk-work. It seems ill-chosen, 
silly, futile. The couple have forgotten, if 
they ever knew, that they are playing at a 

[3] 



OVER THERE 



terrific and long-drawn moment of crisis in 
a spot sacred to the finest civilisation. 

From the balcony you can see, close by, 
the Louvre, with its sculptures extending 
from Jean Goujon to Carpeaux; the Church 
of St. Clotilde, where Cesar Franck for 
forty years hid his genius away from popu- 
larity; the railway station of the Quai 
d'Orsay, which first proved that a terminus 
may excite sensations as fine as those ex- 
cited by a palace or a temple; the dome of 
the Invalides; the unique fa9ades, equal to 
any architecture of modern times, to the 
north of the Place de la Concorde, where the 
Ministry of Marine has its home. Nobody 
who knows Paris, and understands what 
Paris has meant and still means to humanity, 
can regard the scene without the most ex- 
quisite sentiments of humility, affection, and 
gratitude. It is impossible to look at the 
plinths, the mouldings, the carving of the 
Ministry of Marine and not be thrilled by 
that supreme expression of national art. . . . 

And all this escaped! That is the feeling 
which one has. All this beauty was menaced 

[4] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



with disaster at the hands of beings who 
comprehended it even less than the simple 
couple playing ball, beings who have scarcely 
reached the beginnings of comprehension, 
and who joined a barbaric ingenuousness to 
a savage cruelty. It was menaced, but it 
escaped. Perhaps no city was ever in acuter 
peril; it escaped by a miracle, but it did 
escape. It escaped because tens of thou- 
sands of soldiers in thousands of taxi-cabs 
advanced more rapidly than any soldiers 
could be expected to advance. 

"The population of Paris has revolted 
and is hurrying to ask mercy from us!" 
thought the reconnoitring simpletons in 
Taubes, when they noted beneath them the 
incredible processions of taxi-cabs going 
north. But what they saw was the Sixth 
Army, whose movement changed the cam- 
paign, and perhaps the whole course of 
history. 

"A great misfortune has overtaken us," 
said a German officer the next day. It was 
true. Greater than he suspected. . . . 

The horror of what might have happened, 

[5] 



OVER THEEE 



the splendour of what did happen, mingle in 
the awed mind as you look over the city 
from the balcony. The city escaped. And 
the event seems vaster and more sublime 
than the mind can bear. 

The streets of Paris have now a perpetual 
aspect of Sunday morning; only the sound 
of church-bells is lacking. A few of the 
taxi-cabs have come back; but all the auto- 
buses without exception are away behind 
the front. So that the traffic is forced 
underground, where the railways are manned 
by women. A horse-bus, dug up out of the 
past, jogs along the most famous boulevard 
in the world like a country diligence, with 
a fat, laughing peasant-woman clinging to 
its back-step and collecting fare-moneys into 
the immense pocket of her black apron. 
Many of the most expensive and unneces- 
sary shops are shut; the others wait with 
strange meekness for custom. But the pro- 
vision shops and all the sturdy cheap shops 
of the poor go on naturally, without any 
self -consciousness, just as usual. The pave- 
ments show chiefly soldiers in a wild, new 

[6] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



variety of uniforms, from pale blue to black, 
imitated and adapted from all sources, and 
especially from England — and widows and 
orphans. The number of young girls and 
women in mourning, in the heavy mourning 
affected by the Latin race, is enormous. 
This crape is the sole casualty list permitted 
by the French War Office. It suffices. 
Supreme grief is omnipresent ; but it is calm, 
cheerful, smihng. Widows glance at each 
other with understanding, hke initiates of a 
secret and powerful society. . . . 

Never was Paris so disconcertingly odd. 
And yet never was it more profoundly itself. 
Between the slow realisation of a monstrous 
peril escaped and the equally slow realisa- 
tion of its power to punish, the French 
spirit, angered and cold, knows at last what 
the French spirit is. And to watch and 
share its mood is positively ennobling to the 
stranger. Paris is revealed under an en- 
chantment. On the surface of the enchant- 
ment the pettinesses of daily existence per- 
sist queerly. 



[7] 



OVER THERE 



Two small rooms and a kitchen on a sixth 
floor. You could put the kitchen, of which 
the cooking apparatus consists 
SOME of two gas-rings, easily into the 

PARISIAN box that holds the roots of the 
INTERIORS orange-tree in the Tuileries gar- 
dens. Everything is plain, and 
stringently tidy ; everything is a special item, 
separately acquired, treasured. I see again 
a water-colour that I did years ago and had 
forgotten; it lives, protected by a glazed 
frame and by the pride of possession. The 
solitary mistress of this immaculate home is 
a spinster sempstress in the thirties. She 
earns three francs a day, and is rich because 
she does not spend it all, and has never spent 
it all. Inexpressibly neat, smiling, philo- 
sophic, helpful, she has within her a conten- 
tious and formidable tiger which two con- 
tingencies, and two only, will arouse. The 
first contingency springs from any threat 
of marriage. You must not seek a husband 
for her: she is alone in the world, and she 
wants to be. The second springs from any 
attempt to alter her habits, which in her 

[8] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



sight are as sacredly immutable as the ritual 
of an Asiatic pagoda. 

Last summer she went to a small town, to 
which is attached a very large military 
camp, to help her sister-in-law in the running" 
of a cafe. The excursion was to be partly 
in the nature of a hohday ; but, indefatigable 
on a chair with a needle, she could not stand 
for hours on her feet, ministering to a sex 
of which she knew almost nothing. She had 
the nostalgia of the Parisian garret. She 
must go home to her neglected habits. The 
war was waging. She delayed, from a sense 
of duty. But at last her habits were irre- 
sistible. Officers had said lightly that there 
was no danger, that the Germans could not 
possibly reach that small town. Neverthe- 
less, the train that the spinster-sempstress 
took was the last train to leave. And as the 
spinster-sempstress departed by the train, so 
the sister-in-law departed in a pony-cart, 
with a son and a grandmother in the pony- 
cart, together with such goods as the cart 
would hold; and, through staggering adven- 
tures, reached safety at Troyes. 

[9] 



OYER THERE 



"And how did you yourself get on?" I 
asked the spinster-sempstress. 

She answered: 

"It was terrible. Ordinarily it is a jour- 
ney of three or four hours. But that time it 
lasted three days and two nights. The train 
was crammed with refugees and with 
wounded. One was obliged to stand up. 
One could not move." 

"But where did you sleep?" 

"I did not sleep. Do I not tell you one 
was obliged to stand up ? I stood up all the 
first night. The floor was thirty centimetres 
deep in filth. The second night one had 
settled down somewhat. I could sit." 

"But about eating?" 

"I had a little food that I brought with 



me." 



"And drinking?" 

"Nothing, till the second day. One could 
not move. But in the end we arrived. I 
was broken with fatigue. I was very ill. 
But I was at home. . . . The Boches drank 
everything in the cafe, everything; but the 
building was spared — ^it stood away from the 

[10] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



firing. . . . How long do you think the war 
will last?" 

"I'm beginning to think it will last a long 

time." 

"So they say," she murmured, glancing 
through the window at the prospect of roofs 
and chimney-cowls. ". . . Provided that it 
finishes well ..." 

Except by the look in her eyes, and by 
the destruction of her once good complexion, 
it was impossible to divine that this woman's 
habits had ever been disturbed in the 
shghtest detail. But the gaze and the com- 
plexion told the tale. 

Next: the Boulevard St. Germain. A 
majestic flat, heavily and sombrely fur- 
nished. The great drawing-room is shut 
and sheeted with holland. It has been shut 
for twenty years. The mistress of this home 
is an aged widow of inflexible will and as- 
tounding activity. She gets up at five a. m., 
and no cook has ever yet satisfied her. The 
master is her son, a bachelor of fifty. He is 
paralysed, and, always perfectly dressed in 

[11] 



OVER THERE 



the English taste, he passes his Ufe in a 
wheeled chair. The home is centred in his 
study, full of books, engravings, a large safe, 
telephone, theatrophone, newspapers, cigar- 
ettes, easy-chairs. When I go in, an old 
friend, a stockbroker, is there, and "thees" 
and "thous" abound in the conversation, 
which runs on investments, the new English 
loan, banking accounts in London, the rent 
moratorium in Paris, and the war. It is 
said that every German is a critic of war. 
But so is every Frenchman a critic of war. 
The criticism I now hear is the best spoken 
criticism, utterly impartial, that I have 
heard. 

"In sum," says the grey-headed stock- 
broker, "there disengages itself from the 
totahty of the facts an impression, tolerably 
clear, that all goes very well on the West 
front." 

Which is reassuring. But the old lad}^, 
invincible after seven-and-a-half decades 
spent in the hard acquirement of wisdom, 
will not be reassured. She is not alarmed, 
but she will not be reassured. She treats the 

[12] 



THE ZONE OF PAEIS 



two men with affectionate malice as chil- 
dren. She knows that "those birds" — that 
is to say, the Germans — will never be beaten, 
because they are for ever capable of invent- 
ing some new trick. 

She will not sit still. A bit of talk, and she 
runs off with the agihty of a girl to survey 
her household; then returns and cuts into 
the discussion. 

"If you are coming to lunch, Eennett," 
she says, "come before Monday, because on 
Monday my cook takes herself away, and as 
for the new one, I should dare to say noth- 
ing. . . . You don't know, Bennett, you 
don't know, that at a given moment it was 
impossible to buy salt. I mean, they sold it 
to you unwillingly, in little screws of paper. 
It was impossible to get enough. Figure 
that to yourself, you from London ! As for 
chicory for the morning cafe-au-laitj it ex- 
isted not. Gold could not buy it." 

And again she said, speaking of the fear- 
ful days in September: 

"What would you? We waited. My little 
coco is nailed there. He cannot move with- 

[13] 



OVER THERE 



out a furniture-van filled with things essen- 
tial to his existence. I did not wish to move. 
We waited, quite simply. We waited for 
them to come. They did not come. So 
much the better. That is all." 

I have never encountered anything more 
radically French than the temperament of 
this aged woman. 

Next: the luxury quarter — ^the establish- 
ment of one of those fashionable dressmakers 
whom you patronise, and whose bills startle 
all save the most hardened. She is a very 
handsome woman. She has a husband and 
two little boys. They are all there. The 
husband is a retired professional soldier. He 
has a small and easy post in a civil adminis- 
tration, but his real work is to keep his wife's 
books. In August he was re-engaged, and 
ready to lead soldiers under fire in the forti- 
fied camp which Gallieni has evolved out of 
the environs of Paris; but the need passed, 
and the uniform was laid aside. The two 
little boys are combed and dressed as only 
French and American children are combed 

[14] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



and dressed, and with a more economical 
ingenuity than American children. Each 
has a beautiful purple silk necktie and a 
beautiful purple silk handkerchief to match. 
You may notice that the purple silk is ex- 
actly the same purple silk as the lining of 
their mother's rich mantle hanging over a 
chair-back. 

"I had to dismiss my last few workgirls 
on Saturday/' said the dressmaker. "It was 
no longer possible to keep them. I had 
seventy, you know. ISTow — not one. For 
a time we made considerably less than the 
rent. ISTow we make nothing. Neverthe- 
less, some American clients have been very 
kind." 

Her glance went round the empty white 
salons with their mirrors in sculptured 
frames. Naught of her stock was left except 
one or two fragile blouses and a few original 
drawings. 

Said the husband: 

"We are eating our resources. I will tell 
you what this war means to us. It means 
that we shall have to work seven or eight 

[15] 



OVER THERE 



years longer than we had the intention to 
work. What would you?" 

He lifted his arms and lowered the cor- 
ners of his mouth. Then he turned again 
to the military aspect of things, elaborating 
it. 

The soldier in him finished : 

"It is necessary, all the same, to admire 
these cursed Germans." 

"Admire them!" said his wife sharply. "I 
do not appreciate the necessity. When I 
think of that day and that night we spent 
at home !" They live in the eastern suburbs 
of the city. "When I think of that day and 
that night! The cannon thundering at a 
distance of ten kilometres!" 

"Thirty kilometres, almost thirty, my 
friend," the husband corrected. 

"Ten kilometres. I am sure it was not 
more than ten kilometres, my friend." 

"But see, my little one. It was at Meaux. 
Forty kilometres to Meaux. We are at 
thirteen. That makes twenty-seven, at least. 

"It sounded like ten." 

"That is true." 

[16] 



THE ZONE OF PAEIS 



"It sounded like ten, my dear Arnold. 
All day, and all night. We could not go to 
bed. Had one any desire to go to bed? It 
was anguish. The mere souvenir is anguish." 

She kissed her youngest boy, who had long 
hair. 

"Come, come!" the soldier calmed her. 

Lastly: an interior dans le monde; a home 
illustrious in Paris for the riches of its col- 
lections — bric-a-brac, fans, porcelain, fur- 
niture, modern pictures; the walls frescoed 
by Pierre Bonnard and his compeers; a 
black marble balcony with an incomparable 
view in the very middle of the city. Here 
several worlds encoimtered each other: 
authors, painters, musicians, dilettanti, ad- 
ministrators. The hostess had good-natur- 
edly invited a high official of the Foreign 
Office, whom I had not seen for many years; 
she did not say so, but her aim therein was 
to expedite the arrangements for my pil- 
grimages in the war-zone. Sundry of my 
old friends were present. It was wonderful 
how many had escaped active service, either 

[17] 



OYER THERE 



because they were necessary to central ad- 
ministration, or because they were neutrals, 
or because they were too old, or because 
they had been declined on account of phys- 
ical unfitness, rejormes. One or two who 
might have come failed to do so because 
they had perished. 

Amid the abounding, dazzling confusion 
of objects which it was a duty to admire, 
people talked cautiously of the war. With 
tranquillity and exactness and finality the 
high official, clad in pale alpaca and yellow 
boots, explained the secret significance of 
Yellow Books, White Books, Orange Books, 
Blue Books. The ultimate issues were 
never touched, New, yet unprinted, music 
was played; Schumann, though German 
enough, was played. Then literature came 
to the top. A novelist wanted to know what 
I thought of a book called "The Way of 
All Flesh," which he had just read. It is 
singular how that ruthless book makes its 
way across all frontiers. He also wanted to 
know about Gissing, a name new to him. 
And then a voice from the obscurity of the 

[18] 



THE ZONE 0:F PAKIS 



balcony came startlingly to me in the music- 
room: 

"Tell me! Sincerely — do they hate the 
Germans in England? Do they hate them, 
veritably? Tell me. I doubt it. I doubt 
strongly." 

I laughed, rather awkwardly, as any Eng- 
lishman would. 

The transient episode was very detri- 
mental to literary talk. 

■5^ Alfe ijt ^It ^L^ 

Negotiations for a private visit to the 
front languished. The thing was arranged 

right enough, but it seemed 
THE impossible to fix a day for 

BATTLEFIELD actually starting. So I went 

to Meaux. Meaux had stuck 
in my ears. Meaux was in history and in 
romances; it is in Dumas. It was burnt by 
the INTormans in the tenth century, and ter- 
rific massacres occurred outside its walls in 
the fourteenth century, massacres in which 
the English aristocracy took their full share 
of the killing. Also, in the seventeenth 
century, Bossuet was Bishop of Meaux. 

[19] 



OVER THERE 



Finally, in the twentieth century, the Ger- 
mans just got to Meaux, and they got no 
further. It was, so far as I can make out, 
the nearest point to Paris which they soiled. 

I could not go even to Meaux without 
formalities, but the formalities were simple. 
The dilatory train took seventy minutes, 
dawdling along the banks of the notorious 
Marne. In an automobile one could have 
done the journey in half the time. An auto- 
mobile, however, would have seriously com- 
plicated the formalities. Meaux contains 
about fourteen thousand inhabitants. Yet 
it seems, when you are in it, to consist chiefly 
of cathedral. When you are at a httle dis- 
tance away from it, it seems to consist of 
nothing but cathedral. In this it resembles 
Chartres, and many another city in France. 

We obtained a respectable carriage, with 
a melancholy, resigned old driver, who said : 

"For fifteen francs, plus always the pour- 
hoire, I will take you to Barcy, which was 
bombarded and burnt. I will show you all 
the battlefield." 

With those few words he thrilled me. 

[20] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



The road rose slowly from the canal of 
the Ourcq; it was lined with the most beau- 
tiful acacia trees, and through the screen of 
the acacias one had ghmpses of the town, 
diminishing, and of the cathedral, growing 
larger and larger. The driver talked to us 
in faint murmurs over his shoulder, indi- 
cating the positions of various villages such 
as Penchard, Poincy, Cregy, Monthyon, 
Chambry, Varreddes, all of which will be 
found in the future detailed histories of the 
great locust-advance. 

"Did you yourself see any Germans?" 

"Yes." 

"Where?" 

"At Meaux." 

"How many?" 

He smiled. "About a dozen." He under- 
estimated the number, and the length of the 
stay, but no matter. "They were scouts. 
They came into the town for a few hours — 
and left it. The Germans were deceived. 
They might have got to Paris if they had 
liked. But they were deceived." 

"How were they deceived?" 

[21] 



OYEE THERE 



"They thought there were more Enghsh 
in front of them than actually there were. 
The headquarters of the English were over 
there, at La Ferte-sous-Jouarre. The Eng- 
lish blew up our bridge, as a measure of 
precaution." 

We drove on. 

"The first tomb," said the driver, non- 
chalantly, in his weak voice, lifting an elbow. 

There it was, close by the roadside, and a 
little higher than ourselves. The grave was 
marked by four short, rough posts on which 
was strung barbed wire; a white flag; a 
white cross of painted wood, very simply 
but neatly made; a faded wreath. We 
could distinguish a few words of an inscrip- 
tion. ". . . Comrades . . . 66th Terri- 
torials. . . ." Soldiers were buried where 
they fell, and this was the tomb of him who 
fell nearest to Paris. It marked the last 
homicidal effort of the Germans before their 
advance in this region curved eastwards into 
a retreat. This tomb was a very impressive 
thing. The driver had thrilled me again. 

We drove on. We were now in a large 

[22] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



rolling plain that sloped gradually behind 
us southwards towards the Marne. It had 
many little woods and spinneys, and no 
watercourses. To the civihan it appeared 
an ideal theatre for a glorious sanguinary 
battle in which thousands of fathers, sons, 
and brothers should die violently because 
some hierarchy in a distant capital was suf- 
fering from an acute attack of swelled head. 
A few trenches here and there could still be 
descried, but the whole land was in an ad- 
vanced state of cultivation. Wheat and oats 
and flaming poppies had now conquered the 
land, had overrun and possessed it as no 
Germans could ever do. The raw earth of 
the trenches struggled vainly against the 
tide of germination. The harvest was going 
to be good. This plain, with its little woods 
and little villages, glittered with a careless 
and vast satisfaction in the sheets of sun- 
shine that fell out of a bkie too intense for 
the gaze. 

We saw a few more tombs, and a great 
general monument or cenotaph to the dead, 
constructed at cross-roads by military 

[23] 



OVER THERE 



engineers. The driver pointed to the village 
of Penchard, which had been pillaged and 
burnt by the enemy. It was only about a 
mile off, but in the strong, dazzling light 
we could distinguish not the least sign of 
damage. Then we came to a farmhouse by 
the roadside. It was empty; it was a shell, 
and its roof was damaged. The Germans 
had gutted it. They had taken away its 
furniture as booty. (What they intended 
to do with furniture out of a perfectly 
mediocre farmhouse, hundreds of miles 
from home, it is difficult to imagine.) 
Articles which it did not suit them to carry 
off they destroyed. Wine-casks of which 
they could not drink the wine, they stove 
in. . . . And then they retreated. 

This farmhouse was somebody's house, 
just as your home is yours, and mine mine. 
To some woman or other every object in it 
was familiar. She glanced at the canister on 
the mantelpiece and said to herself: "I really 
must clean that canister to-morrow." There 
the house stood, with holes in its roof, empty. 
And if there are half-a-million similarly 

[24] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



tragic houses in Europe to-day, as probably 
there are, such frequency does not in the 
shghtest degree diminish the forlorn tragedy 
of that particular house which I have beheld. 

At last Barcy came into view — the pierced 
remains of its church tower over the brow 
of a rise in the plain. Barcy is our driver's 
show-place. Barcy was in the middle of 
things. The fighting round Barcy lasted a 
night and a day, and Barcy was taken and 
retaken twice. 

"You see the new red roofs," said the 
driver as we approached. "By those new red 
roofs you are in a state to judge a httle 
what the damage was." 

Some of the newly made roofs, however, 
were of tarred paper. 

The street by which we entered had a 
small-pox of shrapnel and bullet-marks. 
The post office had particularly suffered: 
its bones were laid bare. It had not been 
restored, but it was ready to do any busi- 
ness that fell to be done, though closed on 
that afternoon. We turned a corner, and 
came upon the church. The work on the 

[25] 



OYER THERE 



church was well up to the reported Teutonic 
average. Of its roof only the rafters were 
left. The windows were all smashed, and 
their lead fantastically twisted. The west 
door was entirely gone; a rough grille of 
strips of wood served in its stead. Through 
this grille one could see the nave and altar, 
in a miraculous and horrible confusion. It 
was as if house-breakers had spent days in 
doing their best to produce a professional 
effect. The oak pews were almost unharmed. 
Immediately behind the grille lay a great 
bronze bell, about three feet high, covered 
with beautifully incised inscriptions; it was 
unhurt. Apparently nothing had been ac- 
complished, in ten months, towards the 
restoration of the church. But something 
was contemplated, perhaps already started. 
A polished steel saw lay on one of the pews, 
but there was no workman attached to it. 

While I was writing some notes in the 
porch three little boys came up and dili- 
gently stared at me. 

"What dost thou want?" I said sharply 
to the tallest. 

[26] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



"Nothing," he repHed. 

Then three widows came up, one young, 
one young and beautiful, one middle-aged. 

We got back into the carriage. 

"The village seems very deserted," I said 
to the driver. 

"What would you?" he answered. "Many 
went. They had no home. Few have re- 
turned." 

All around were houses of which nothing 
remained but the stone walls. The Germans 
had shown great prowess here, and the 
French still greater. It was a village upon 
which rival commanders could gaze with 
pride. It will remember the fourth and the 
fifth of September. 

We made towards Chambry. Chambry is 
a village which, hke Meaux, lies below the 
plain. Chambry escaped glory ; but between 
it and Barcy, on the intervening slope 
through which a good road runs, a battle was 
fought. You know what kind of a battle it 
was by the tombs. These tombs were very 
like the others — an oblong of barbed wire, a 
white flag, a white cross, sometimes a name, 

[27] 



OVER THERE 



more often only a number, rarely a wreath. 
You see first one, then another, then two, 
then a sprinkling; and gradually you per- 
ceive that the whole plain is dotted with 
gleams of white flags and white crosses, so 
that graves seem to extend right away to 
the horizon marked by lines of trees. Then 
you see a huge general grave. . . . Much 
glory about that spot ! 

And then a tomb with a black cross. Very 
disconcerting, that black cr(5ss ! It is differ- 
ent not only in colour, but in shape, from the 
other crosses. Sinister! You need not to 
be told that the body of a German lies be- 
neath it. The whole devilishness of the 
Prussian ideal is expressed in that black 
cross. Then, as the road curves, you see 
more black crosses, many black crosses, very 
many. No flags, no names, no wreaths on 
these tombs. Just a white stencilled number 
in the centre of each cross. Women in Ger- 
many are still lying awake at nights and 
wondering what those tombs look like. 

Watching over all the tombs, white and 
black without distinction, are notices: "Re- 

[28] 



THE ZONE OF PARIS 



spect the Tombs." But the wheat and the 
oats are not respecting the tombs. Every- 
where the crops have encroached on them, 
half -hiding them, smothering them, chmbing 
right over them. In one place wheat is 
ripening out of the very body of a German 
soldier. . . . 

Such is the nearest battlefield to Paris. 
Corporate excursions to it are forbidden, and 
wisely. For the attraction of the place, were 
it given play, would completely demoralise 
Meaux and the entire district. 

In half-an-hour we were back at an utterly 
matter-of-fact railway station, in whose 
cafe an utterly matter-of-fact and capable 
Frenchwoman gave us tea. And when we 
reached Paris we had the news that a Staff 
Captain of the French Army had been de- 
tailed to escort us to the front and to show 
us all that could safely be seen. Neverthe- 
less, whatever I may experience, I shall not 
experience again the thrill which I had when 
the weak and melancholy old driver pointed 
out the first tomb. That which we had just 
seen was the front once. 

[29] 



CHAPTER TWO 
ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



CHAPTER II 

ON THE FRENCH FRONT 

We were met at a poste de commande- 
ment by the officers in charge, who were 

waiting for us. And later we 
A VIEW found that we were always 
OF WAR thus met. The highest officer 

present — General, Colonel, or 
Commandant — was at every place at our 
disposition to explain things — and to explain 
them with that clarity of which the French 
alone have the secret, and of which a super- 
lative example exists in the official report of 
the earlier phases of the war, offered to the 
Anglo-Saxon public through Renter. Auto- 
mobiles and chauffeurs abounded for our 
small party of four. Never once at any 
moment of the day, whether driving furi- 
ously along somewhat deteriorated roads in 
the car, or walking about the land, did I 
lack a Staff officer who produced in me the 
illusion that he was living solely in order to 

[33] 



OVER THERE 



be of use to me. All details of the excursions 
were elaborately organised; never once did 
the organisation break down. No pre- 
Lusitania American correspondent could 
have been more spoiled by Germans desper- 
ately anxious for his goodwill than I was 
spoiled by these French who could not gain 
my goodwill because they had the whole of 
it already. 

After the rites of greeting, we walked up 
to the high terrace of a considerable chateau 
close by, and France lay before us in a 
shimmering vast semicircle. In the distance, 
a low range of hills, irregularly wooded; 
then a river ; then woods and spinneys ; then 
vineyards — boundless vineyards which 
climbed in varying slopes out of the valley 
almost to our feet. Far to the left was a 
town with lofty factory chimneys, smoke- 
less. Peasant women were stooping in the 
vineyards ; the whole of the earth seemed to 
be cultivated and to be yielding bounteously. 
It was a magnificent summer afternoon. 
The sun was high, and a few huge purple 
shadows moved with august deliberation 

[34] 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



across the brilliant greens. An impression 
of peace, majesty, grandeur; and of the 
mild, splendid richness of the soil of France. 

"You see that white line on the hills op- 
posite," said an officer, opening a large-scale 
map. 

I guessed it was a level road. 

"That is the German trenches," said he. 
"They are five miles away. Their gun posi- 
tions are in the woods. Our own trenches 
are invisible from here." 

It constituted a great moment, this first 
vision of the German trenches. With the 
thrill came the lancinating thought: "All of 
France that lies beyond that line, land just 
like the land on which I am standing, in- 
habited by people just Hke the people who 
are talking to me, is under the insulting 
tyranny of the invader," And I also 
thought, as the sense of distance quickened 
my imagination to realise that these trenches 
stretched from Ostend to Switzerland, and 
that the creators of them were prosecuting 
similar enterprises as far north-east as Riga, 
and as far south-east as the confines of 

[35] 



OVER THERE 



Roumania: "The brigands are mad, but they 
are mad in the grand manner." 

We were at the front. 

We had driven for twenty miles along a 
very busy road which was closed to civiUans, 
and along which even Staff officers could not 
travel without murmuring the password to 
placate the hostile vigilance of sentries. The 
civil life of the district was in abeyance, 
proceeding precariously from meal to meal. 
Aeroplanes woke the sleep. No letter could 
leave a post-office without a precautionary 
delay of three days. Telegrams were sus- 
pect. To get into a railway station was 
almost as difficult as to get into paradise. 
A passport or a safe-conduct was the sine 
qua non of even the restricted liberty which 
had survived. And yet nowhere did I see a 
frown nor hear a complaint. Everybody 
comprehended that the exigencies of the ter- 
rific military machine were necessary exi- 
gencies. Everybody waited, waited, in con- 
fidence and with tranquil smiles. 

Also it is misleading to say that civil life 
was in abeyance. For the elemental basis 

[36] 



ON THE FRENCH ERONT 



of its prosperity and its amenities continued 
just as though the lunatic buUies of Potsdam 
had never dictated to Vienna the ultimatum 
for Serbia. The earth was yielding, 
fabulously. It was yielding up to within 
a mile and a-half of the German wire 
entanglements. The peasants would not 
neglect the earth. Officers remonstrated 
with them upon their perilous rash- 
ness. They rephed: "The land must be 
tilled." Must! When the German artillery 
begins to fire, the blue-clad women sink out 
of sight amid the foliage. Half an hour 
after it has ceased they cautiously emerge, 
and resume. One peasant put up an um- 
brella, but he was a man. 

We were veritably at the front. There 
was, however, not a whisper of war, nor 
anything visible except the thin, pale line 
Hke a striation on the distant hills. Then a 
far-off sound of thunder is heard. It is a 
gun. A faint puff cff smoke is pointed out 
to us. Neither the rumble nor the transient 
cloudlet makes any apparent impression on 
the placid and wide dignity of the scene. 

[37] 



OVER THERE 



Nevertheless, this is war. And war seems 
a very vague, casual, and negligible thing. 
We are led about fifty feet to the left, where 
in a previous phase a shell has indented a 
huge hole in the earth. The sight of this 
hole renders war rather less vague and rather 
less negligible. 

"There are eighty thousand men in front 
of us," says an officer, indicating the benign 
shimmering, empty, landscape. 

"But where?" 

"Interred — in the trenches." 

It is incredible. 

"And the other interred — the dead?" I 
asx^. 

"We never speak of them. But we think 
of them a good deal." 

*^£, ^^ jS^ jfe 

"*JV ^* ^» 7|» 

Still a little closer to war. 

The pare du genie — engineers' park. We 
inspected hills of coils of the most formid- 
able barbed wire, far surpassing that of 
farmers, well contrived to tear to pieces any 
human being who, having got into its en- 
tanglement, should try to get out again. One 

[38] 



ON THE FRENCH FEONT 



thought that nothing but steam-chisels would 
be capable of cutting it. Also stacks of 

timber for shoring up mines 
BEHIND THE which sappers would dig be- 
FiRiNG LINE neath the enemy trenches. 

Also sacks to be filled with 
earth for improvised entrenching. Also 
the four-pointed contraptions called chevaucc 
de frise, which — however you throw them 
— will always stick a fatal point upwards, 
to impale the horse or man who cannot 
or will not look where he is going. Even 
tarred paper, for keeping the weather out of 
trenches or anything else. And all these 
things in unimagined quantities. 

Close by, a few German prisoners per- 
forming sanitary duties under a guard. 
They were men in God's image, and they 
went about on the assmnption that all the 
rest of the war lay before them and that 
there was a lot of it. A General told us 
that he had mentioned to them the possi- 
bihty of an exchange of prisoners, where- 
upon they had gloomily and pathetically 
protested. They very sincerely did not want 

[39] 



OVER THERE 



to go back whence they had come, preferring 
captivity, humihation, and the basest tasks 
to a share in the great glory of German 
arms. To me they had a brutahsed air, no 
doubt one minor consequence of mihtary 
ambition in high places. 

Not many minutes away was a hospital 
— ^what the French call an ambulance de 
premiere ligne^ contrived out of a factory. 
This was the hospital nearest to the trenches 
in that region, and the wounded come to it 
direct from the dressing-stations which lie 
immediately behind the trenches. When a 
man falls, or men fall, the automobile is 
telephoned for, and it arrives at the ap- 
pointed rendezvous generally before the 
stretcher-bearers, who may have to walk for 
twenty or thirty minutes over rough ground. 
A wounded man may be, and has been, 
operated upon in this hospital within an 
hour of his wounding. It is organised on a 
permanent basis, for cases too serious for 
removal have, of course, to remain there. 
Nevertheless, these establishments are, as 
regards their staff, patients, and material, 

[40] 



ON THE FRENCH FKONT 



highly mobile. One hospital of two hun- 
dred beds was once entirely evacuated within 
sixty minutes upon a sudden order. We 
walked through small ward after small 
ward, store-room after store-room, aseptic 
operating-room and septic operating-room, 
all odorous with ether, and saw little but 
resignation, and not much of that, for pa- 
tients happened to be few. Yet the worn 
face of the doctor in charge showed that 
vast labours must have been accomplished in 
those sombre chambers. 

In the very large courtyard a tent operat- 
ing-hospital was established. The white 
attendants were waiting within in the pallid 
obscurity, among tables, glass jars, and in- 
struments. The surgeon's wagon, with hot 
water and sterilising apparatus, was waiting 
without. The canvas organism was a real 
hospital, and the point about it was that it 
could move off complete at twenty-five 
minutes' notice and set itself up again in 
any other ordained location in another 
twenty-five minutes. 

Another short ride, and we were in an 

[41] 



OVER THERE 



aviation park, likewise tented, in the midst 
of an immense wheatfield on the lofty side 
of a hill. There were six hangars of canvas, 
each containing an aeroplane and serving as 
a dormitory; and for each aeroplane a car- 
riage and a motor — for sometimes aero- 
planes are wounded and have to travel by 
road; it takes ninety minutes to dismount 
an aeroplane. Each corps of an army has 
one of these e-scadrilles or teams of aero- 
planes, and the army as a whole has an extra 
one, so that, if an army consists of eight 
corps, it possesses fifty-four aeroplanes. I 
am speaking now of the particular type of 
aeroplane employed for regulating artillery 
fire. It was a young non-commissioned 
ofiicer with a marked Southern accent who 
explained to us the secret nature of things. 
He was wearing both the Military Medal 
and the Legion of Honour, for he had done 
wondrous feats in the way of shooting the 
occupants of Taubes in mid-air. He got out 
one of the machines, and exhibited its tricks 
and its wireless apparatus, and invited us to 
sit in the seat of the flier. The weather was 

[42] 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



quite unsuitable for flying, but, setting four 
men to hold the machine in place, he started 
the Gnome motor and ran it up to two 
thousand revolutions a minute, creating a 
draught which bowed the fluttered wheat 
for many yards behind and blew hats off. 
And in the middle of this pother he con- 
tinued to offer lucid and surprising explana- 
tions to deafened ears until his superior 
officer, excessively smart and looking like a 
cross between a cavalryman and a yachts- 
man, arrived on the scene swinging a cane. 

It was natural that after this we should 
visit some auto=cannons expressly con- 
structed for bringing down aeroplanes. In 
front of these marvels it was suggested to 
us that we should neither take photographs 
nor write down exact descriptions. As re- 
gards the latter, the Staff Officers had reason 
to be reassured. No living journalist could 
have reproduced the scientific account of the 
sighting arrangements given to us in an 
esoteric yet quite comprehensible language 
by the high priest of these guns, who was a 
middle-aged artillery Captain. It lasted 

[43] 



OVER THERE 



about twenty minutes. It was complete, 
final, unchallengeable. At intervals the 
artillery Captain himself admitted that such- 
and-such a part of the device was tres beau. 
It was. There was only one word of which 
I could not grasp the significance in that 
connection. It recurred. Several times I 
determined to ask the Captain what he 
meant us to understand by that word; but 
I lacked moral courage. I doubt whether in 
all the lethal apparatus that I saw in France 
I saw anything quite equal to the demoniac 
ingenuity of these massive guns. The proof 
of guns is in the shooting. These guns 
do not merely aim at Taubes: they hit 
them. 

I will not, however, derogate from the 
importance of the illustrious "seventy-five." 
We saw one of these on an afternoon of 
much marching up and down hills and 
among woods, gazing at horses and hot- 
water douches, baths, and barbers' shops, 
and deep dug-outs called "Tipperary," and 
guns of various calibre, including the 
"seventy-five." The "seventy-five" is a very 

[44] 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



sympathetic creature, in blue-grey with 
metalHc ghnts. He is perfectly easy to see 
when you approach him from behind, but 
get twenty yards in front of him and he is 
absolutely undiscoverable. Viewed from 
the sky, he is part of the forest. Viewed 
from behind, he is perceived to be in a 
wooden hut with rafters, in which you can 
just stand upright. We beheld the work- 
ing of the gun, by two men, and we beheld 
the different sorts of shell in their delved 
compartments. But this was not enough 
for us. We ventured to suggest that it 
would be proper to try to kill a few Germans 
for our amusement. The request was in- 
stantly granted. 

"Time for 4,300 metres," said the Lieu- 
tenant quickly and sternly, and a soldier 
manipulated the obus. 

It was done. It was done with discon- 
certing rapidity. The shell was put into 
its place. A soldier pulled a string. Bang! 
A neat, clean, not too loud bang ! The mes- 
senger had gone invisibly forth. The pret- 
tiest part of the affair was the recoil and 

[45] 



OVER THERE 



automatic swinging back of the gun. Lest 
the first shell should have failed in its mis- 
sion, the Commandant ordered a second one 
to be sent, and this time the two artillerymen 
sat in seats attached on either side to the gun 
itself. The "seventy-five" was enthusiastic- 
ally praised by every officer present. He is 
beloved like a favourite sporting dog, and 
with cause. 

^ ^ <V nf <!« 

At the side of the village street there was 
a bit of sharply sloping ground, with a 

ladder thrown on it to 
IN THE make descent easier. 

FIRE-TRENCHES "This Way," said one of 

the officers. 

We followed him, and in an instant were 
in the communication trench. The change 
was magical in its quickness. At one 
moment we were on the earth; at the next 
we were in it. The trench was so narrow 
that I had to hold my stick in front of me, 
as there was no room to swing the arms; 
the chalky sides left traces on the elbows. 

[46] 



ON THE TRElSrCH PEONT 



The floor was for the most part quite dry, 
but at intervals there were muddy pools 
nearly ankle-deep. The top of the trench 
was about level with the top of my head, 
and long grasses or chance cereals, bending 
down, continually brushed the face. An 
officer was uplifted for the rest of the day 
by finding a four-leaved clover at the edge 
of the trench. The day was warm, and the 
trench was still warmer. Its direction never 
ceased to change, generally in curves, but 
now and then by a sharp corner. We walked 
what seemed to be an immense distance, and 
then came out on to a road, which we were 
instructed to cross two by two, as, like the 
whole of the region, it was subject to Ger- 
man artillery. Far down this road we could 
see the outlying village for which we were 
bound. . . . 

A new descent into the earth. We pro- 
ceed a few yards, and the trench suddenly 
divides into three. We do not know which 
to take. An officer following us does not 
know which to take. The guiding officer is 
perhaps thirty yards in front ! We call. No 

[47] 



OVER THEEE 



answer. We climb out of the trench on to 
the surface desolation; we can see nothing, 
nothing whatever, but land that is running 
horribly to waste. Our friends are as in- 
visible as moles. There is not a trace even 
of their track. This is a fine object-lesson 
in the efficacy of trenches. At length an 
officer returns and saves us. We have to 
take the trench on the extreme right. Much 
more hot walking, and a complete loss of 
the notion of direction. 

Then we come out on to another portion 
of the same road at the point where a main 
line of railway crosses it. We are told to 
run to shelter. In the near distance a Ger- 
man captive balloon sticks up moveless 
against the sky. The main line of railway 
is a sorrowful sight. Its signal-wires hang 
in festoons. Its rails are rusting. The 
abandonment of a main line in a civilised 
country is a thing unknown, a thing con- 
trary to sense, an impossible thing, so that 
one wonders whether one is not visiting the 
remains of a civilisation dead and definitely 
closed. Very strange thoughts pass through 

[48] 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



the mind. . . . That portion of the main 
hne cannot be used by the Germans because 
it is within the French positions, and it can- 
not be used by the French because it is 
utterly exposed to German artillery. Thus, 
perhaps ten kilometres of it are left forlorn 
to illustrate the imbecile brutality of an 
invasion. 

There is a good deal more trench before 
we reach the village which forms the head 
of a salient in the French line. This village 
is knocked all to pieces. It is a fearful spec- 
tacle. We see a Teddy-bear left on what 
remains of a flight of stairs, a bedstead 
buried to the knobs in debris, skeletons of 
birds in a cage hanging under an eave. The 
entire place is in the zone of fire, and it has 
been tremendously bombarded throughout 
the war. Nevertheless, some houses still 
stand, and seventeen civilians — seven men 
and ten women — insist on remaining there. 
I talked to one fat old woman, who con- 
tended that there was no danger. A few 
minutes later a shell fell within a hundred 
yards of her, and it might just as well have 

[49] 



OYER THERE 



fallen on the top of her coiffe, to prove 
finally to her the noble reasonableness of 
war and the reality of the German necessity 
for expansion. 

The village church was laid low. In the 
roof two thin arches of the groining remain, 
marvellously. One remembers this freak of 
balance — and a few poor flowers on the 
altar. Mass is celebrated in that church 
every Sunday morning. We spoke with the 
cure, an extremely emaciated priest of 
middle age ; he wore the Legion of Honour. 
We took to the trenches again, having in the 
interval been protected by several acres of 
ruined masonry. About this point geog- 
raphy seemed to end for me. I was in a 
maze of burrowing, from which the hot sun 
could be felt but not seen. I saw stencilled 
signs, such as "Tranchee de replif^ and signs 
containing numbers. I saw a sign over a 
door: ''Guetteur de jour et de nuW — 
watcher by day and by night. 

"Anybody in there?" 

"Certainly." 

The door was opened. In the gloom a 

[50] 





.« r\ r\ ■% '.V^v ^^- - 







THE CHURCH AT BETHANY 



"The village church was laid low. In the roof two 
thin arches of the groining remain, marveiiously . 
One remembers this freak of balance— and a jew 
poor flowers on the altar. Mass zs celebrated in 
that church every Sunday morning. [fage bU\ 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



pale man stood rather like a ghost, almost 
as disconcerting as a ghost, watching. He 
ignored us, and kept on watching. 

Then through a hole I had a glimpse of an 
abandoned road, where no man might live, 
and beyond it a vast wire entanglement. 
Then we curved, and I was in an open place, 
a -sort of redoubt contrived out of httle homes 
and cattle-stables. I heard irregular rifle- 
fire close by, but I could not see who was 
firing. I was shown the machine-gun 
chamber, and the blind which hides the 
aperture for the muzzle was hfted, but only 
mxomentarily. I was shown, too, the deep 
underground refuges to which everybody 
takes in case of a heavy bombardment. 
Then we were in the men's quarters, in 
houses very well protected by advance walls 
to the north, and at length we saw some 
groups of men. 

''Bon jour, les poilusT 

This from the Commandant himself, with 
jollity. The Commandant had a wonderful 
smile, which showed bright teeth, and his 
gestures were almost as quick as those of his 

[51] 



OVER THERE 



Lieutenant, whom the regiment had chris- 
tened "The Electric Man." 

The soldiers saluted. This salute was so 
proud, so eager, that it might have brought 
tears to the eyes. The soldiers stood up 
very straight, but not at all stiffly. I noticed 
one man, because I could not notice them 
all. He threw his head back, and slightly to 
one side, and his brown beard stuck out. 
His eyes sparkled. Every muscle was taut. 
He seemed to be saying, "My Commandant, 
I know my worth; I am utterly yours — 
you won't get anything better." A young 
officer said to me that these men had in them 
a wild beast and an angel. It was a good 
saying, and I wished I had thought of it 
myself. This regiment had been in this vil- 
lage since the autumn. It had declined to 
be relieved. It seemed absolutely fresh. 
One hears that individual valour is about the 
same in all armies — everywhere very high. 
Events appear to have justified the asser- 
tion. German valour is astounding. I have 
not seen any German regiment, but I do 
not believe that there are in any German 

[52] 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



regiment any men equal to these men. After 
all, ideas must count, and these men know 
that they are defending an outraged coun- 
try, while the finest German soldier knows 
that he is outraging it. 

The regiment was relatively very com- 
fortable. It had plenty of room. It had 
made a little garden, with little terra-cotta 
statues. It possessed also a gymnasium 
ground, where we witnessed some excellent 
high jumping; and — more surprising — a 
theatre, with stage, dressing-room, and 
women's costumes. 

The summit of our excitement was at- 
tained when we were led into the first-line 
trench. 

"Is this really the first-line trench?" 

"It is." 

Well, the first-line trench, very remark- 
ably swept and dusted and spotless — as 
were all the trenches beyond the communi- 
cation trench — ^was not much like a trench. 
It was like a long wooden gallery. Its sides 
were of wood, its ceiling was of wood, its 
floor was of wood. The carpentry, though 

[53] 



OVER THERE 



not expert, was quite neat; and we were 
told that not a single engineer had ever 
been in the position, which, nevertheless, is 
reckoned to be one of the most ingenious on 
the whole front. The gallery is rather dark, 
because it is lighted only by the loop-holes. 
These loop-holes are about eight inches 
square, and more than eight inches deep, 
because they must, of course, penetrate the 
outer earthwork. A couple of inches from 
the bottom a strong wire is fixed across them. 
At night the soldier puts his gun under this 
wire, so that he may not fire too high. 

The loop-holes are probably less than a 
yard apart, allowing enough space in front 
of each for a man to move comfortably. 
Beneath the loop-holes runs a wooden plat- 
form for the men to stand on. Behind the 
loop-holes, in the ceiling, are large hooks to 
hang guns on. Many of the loop-holes are 
labelled with men's names, written in a good 
engrossing hand ; and between the loop-holes, 
and level with them, are pinned coloured 
postcards and photographs of women, girls, 
and children. Tucked conveniently away 

[54] 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



in zinc cases underground are found zinc 
receptacles for stores of cartridges, powders 
to be used against gas, grenades, and 
matches. 

One gazes through a loop-hole. Occa- 
sional firing can be heard, but it is not in the 
immediate vicinity. Indeed, all the men we 
can see have stepped down from the plat- 
form in order to allow us to pass freely along 
it and inspect. Through the loop-hole can 
be distinguished a barbed-wire entangle- 
ment, then a little waste ground, then more 
barbed-wire entanglement (German), and 
then the German trenches, which are less 
than half a mile away, and which stretch 
round behind us in a semicircle. 

"Do not look too long. They have very 
good glasses." 

The hint is taken. It is singular to reflect 
that just as we are gazing privily at the 
Germans, so the Germans are gazing privily 
at us. A mere strip of level earth separates 
them from us, but that strip is impassable, 
save at night, when the Frenchmen often 
creep up to the German wire. There is a 

[55] 



OVER THERE 



terrible air of permanency about the whole 
affair. Not only the passage of time pro- 
duces this effect ; the telephone-wire running 
along miles of communication-trench, the 
elaborateness of the fighting trenches, the 
established routine and regularity of exist- 
ence — all these also contribute to it. But 
the air of permanency is fallacious. The 
Germans are in France. Every day of slow 
preparation brings nearer the day when the 
Germans will not be in France. That is 
certain. An immense expectancy hangs 
over the land, enchanting it. 

We leave the first-line trench, with regret. 
But we have been in it! 

In the quarters of the Commandant, a 
farm-house at the back end of the village, 
champagne was served, admirable cham- 
pagne. We stood round a long table, wait- 
ing till the dilatory should have arrived. 
The party had somehow grown. For ex- 
ample, the cure came, amid acclamations. 
He related how a Lieutenant had accosted 
him in front of some altar and asked whether 
he might be allowed to celebrate the Mass. 

[56] 



ON THE FRENCH FRONT 



"That depends," said the cure. "You can- 
not celebrate if you are not a priest. If 
you are, you can." "I am a priest," said the 
Lieutenant. And he celebrated the Mass. 
Also the Intendant came, a grey-haired, 
dour, kind-faced man. The Intendant has 
charge of supplies, and he is cherished ac- 
cordingly. And in addition to the Com- 
mandant, and the Electric Man, and our 
Staff Captains, there were sundry non-com- 
missioned officers, and even privates. 

We were all equal. The French Army 
is by far the most democratic institution I 
have ever seen. On our journeys the Staff 
Captains and ourselves habitually ate with 
a sergeant and a corporal. The corporal 
was the son of a General. The sergeant was 
a man of business and a writer. His first 
words when he met me were in English: 
"Monsieur Bennett, I have read your 
books." One of our chauffeurs was a well- 
known printer who employs three hundred 
and fifty men — when there is peace. The 
relations between officers and men are simply 
unique. 1 never saw a greeting that was 

[57] 



OVER THERE 



not exquisite. The officers were full of 
knowledge, decision, and appreciative kindli- 
ness. The men were bursting with eager 
devotion. This must count, perhaps, even 
more than big guns. 

The Commandant, of course, presided at 
the vin dfhonneur. His glance and his smile, 
his latent energy, would have inspired devo- 
tion in a wooden block. Every glass touched 
every glass, an operation which entailed 
some three-score clinkings. And while we 
were drinking, one of the Staff Captains — 
the one whose English was the less perfect 
of the two — began to tell me of the career 
of the Commandant, in Algeria and else- 
where. Among other things, he had carried 
his wounded men on his own shoulders 
under fire from the field of battle to a place 
of safety. He was certainly under forty; 
he might have been under thirty-five. 

Said the Staff Captain, ingenuously 
translating in his mind from French to Eng- 
lish, and speaking with slow caution, as 
though picking his way among the chevauoo 
de frise of the English language : 

[58] 



ON THE FEENCH FRONT 



"There are — very beautiful pages — in his 
— mihtary hfe." 

He meant: "II y a de tres belles pages 
dans sa carriere militaire" 

Which is subtly not quite the same thing. 

As we left the farm-house to regain the 
communication trench there was a fierce, 
loud noise hke this: ZZZZZ ssss ZZZZ sss 
ZZZZ, And then an explosion. The ob- 
server in the captive balloon had noticed un- 
accustomed activity in our village, and the 
consequences were coming. We saw yellow 
smoke rising just beyond the wall of the 
farmyard, about two hundred yards away. 
We received instructions to hurry to the 
trench. We had not gone fifty yards in the 
trench when there was another celestial con- 
fusion of S's and Z's. Imitating the officers, 
we bent low in the trench. The explosion 
followed. 

"One, two, three, four, five," said a Cap- 
tain. "One should not rise till one has 
counted five, because all the bits have not 
fallen. If it is a big shell, count ten." 

We tiptoed and glanced over the edge 

[59] 



OYER THERE 



of the trench. Yellow smoke was rising at 
a distance of about three lawn-tennis courts. 

"With some of their big shells/' said the 
Captain, "y^^ ^^^ hesir nothing until it is 
too late, for the reason that the shell travels 
more quickly than the sound of it. The 
sounds reach your ears in inverse order — if 
you are alive." 

A moment later a third shell dropped in 
the same plot of ground. 

And even a mile and a half off, at the other 
end of the communication trench, when the 
automobiles emerged from their shelter into 
the view of the captive balloon, the officers 
feared for the automobiles, and we fled very 
swiftly. 

We had been to the very front of the front, 
and it was the most cheerful, confident, high- 
spirited place I had seen in France, or in 
England either. 



[60] 



CHAPTER THREE 
RUINS 



CHAPTER III 

RUINS 

When you go into Rheims by the Eper- 
nay road, the Ufe of the street seems to be 
proceeding, as usual, except that 
RHEIMS octroi formalities have been abol- 
ished. Women, some young and 
beautiful, stare nonchalantly as the car 
passes. Children are playing and shrieking 
in the sunshine; the little cafes and shops 
keep open door; the baker is busy; middle- 
aged persons go their ways in meditation 
upon existence. It is true there are soldiers ; 
but there are soldiers in every important 
French town at all seasons of the year in 
peace-time. In short, the spectacle is just 
that ordinarily presented by the poorer ex- 
terior thoroughfares leading towards the 
centre of a city. 

And yet, in two minutes, in less than two 
minutes, you may be in a quarter where no 
life is left. This considerable quarter is not 

[63] 



OVER THERE 



seriously damaged — it is destroyed. Not 
many houses, but every house in it will have 
to be rebuilt from the cellars. This quarter 
is desolation. Large shops, large houses, 
small shops, and small houses have all been 
treated alike. The facade may stand, the 
roof may have fallen in entirely or only par- 
tially, floors may have disappeared alto- 
gether or may still be clinging at odd angles 
to the walls — the middle of every building is 
the same: a vast heap of what once was the 
material of a home or a business, and what 
now is foul rubbish. In many instances the 
shells have revealed the functioning of the 
home at its most intimate, and that is seen 
which none should see. Indignation rises 
out of the heart. Amid stacks of refuse you 
may distinguish a bath, a magnificent frag- 
ment of mirror, a piece of tapestry, a sauce- 
pan. In a funeral shop wreaths still hang 
on their hooks for sale. Telephone and tele- 
graph wires depend in a loose tangle from 
the poles. The clock of the Protestant 
church has stopped at a quarter to six. The 
shells have been freakish. In one building 

[64] 



RUINS 

a shell harmlessly made a hole in the court- 
yard large enough to bury every commander 
of a German army; another shell — a 210 
mm. — went through an inner wall and 
opened up the cellars by destroying 150 
square feet of ground-floor : ten people were 
in the cellars, and none was hurt. Uninjured 
signs of cafes and shops, such as "The Good 
Hope," "The Success of the Day," meet 
your gaze with sardonic calm. 

The inhabitants of this quarter, and of 
other quarters in Rheims, have gone. Some 
are dead. Others are picnicking in Eper- 
nay, Paris, elsewhere. They have left 
everything behind them, and yet they have 
left nothing. Each knows his lot in the im- 
mense tragedy. Nobody can realise the 
whole of the tragedy. It defies the mind; 
and, moreover, the horror of it is allayed 
somewhat by the beautiful forms which ruin 
— even the ruin of modern ugly architecture 
— occasionally takes. The effect of the pallor 
of a bedroom wall-paper against smoke- 
blackened masonry, where some corner of a 
house sticks up like a tall, serrated column 

[65] 



OVER THERE 



out of the confusion, remains obstinately in 
the memory, symbolising, somehow, the 
grand German deed. 

For do not forget that this quarter accu- 
rately represents what the Germans came out 
of Germany into France deliberately to do. 
This material devastation, this annihilation 
of effort, hope, and love, this substitution 
of sorrow for joy — is just what plans and 
guns were laid for, what the worshipped 
leaders of the Fatherland prepared with the 
most wanton and scientific solicitude. It is 
desperately cruel. But it is far worse than 
cruel — it is idiotic in its immense futility. 
The perfect idiocy of the thing overwhelms 
you. And to your reason it is as monstrous 
that one population should overrun another 
with murder and destruction from political 
covetousness as that two populations should 
go to war concerning a religious creed. 
Indeed, it is more monstrous. It is an ob- 
scene survival, a phenomenon that has 
strayed, through some negligence of fate, 
into the wrong century. 

Strange, in an adjoining quarter, partly 

[66] 



RUINS 

but not utterly destroyed, a man is coming 
home in a cab with luggage from the station, 
and the servant-girl waits for him at the 
house-door. And I heard of a case where 
a property-owner who had begun to build a 
house just before the war has lately resmned 
building operations. In the Esplanade 
Ceres the fountain is playing amid all the 
ravage; and the German trenches, in that 
direction, are not more than two miles away. 

It is quite impossible for any sane man to 
examine the geography of the region of 
destruction which I have so summarily 
described without being convinced that the 
Germans, in shelling it, were simply aiming 
at the Cathedral. Tracing the streets 
affected, one can follow distinctly the process 
of their searching for the precise range of 
the Cathedral. Practically the whole of the 
damage is concentrated on the line of the 
Cathedral. 

But the Cathedral stands. 

Its parvis is grass-grown; the hotels on 
the parvis are heavily battered, and if they 
are not destroyed it is because the Cathedral 

[67] 



OVER THERE 



sheltered them ; the Archbishop's palace lies 
in fragments; all aromid is complete ruin. 
But the Cathedral stands, high above the 
level of disaster, a unique target, and a tar- 
get successfully defiant. The outer roof is 
quite gone ; much masonry is smashed ; some 
of the calcined statues have exactly the ap- 
pearance of tortured human flesh. But in 
its essence, and in its splendid outlines, the 
building remains — apparently unconquer- 
able. The towers are particularly serene 
and impressive. The deterioration is, of 
course, tremendously severe. Scores, if not 
hundreds, of statues, each of which was a 
masterpiece, are spoilt; great quantities of 
carving are defaced; quite half the glass is 
irremediably broken; the whole of the in- 
terior non-structural decoration is destroyed. 
But the massiveness of the Cathedral has 
withstood German shrapnel. The place will 
never be the same again, or nearly the same. 
Nevertheless, Rheims Cathedral trium- 
phantly exists. 

The Germans use it as a vent for their 
irritation. When things go wrong for them 

[68] 



BUINS 



at other parts of the front, they shell Rheims 
Cathedral. It has absolutely no military 
interest, but it is beloved by civihsed man- 
kind, and therefore is a means of offence. 
The French tried to remove some of the 
glass, utihsing an old scaffolding. At once 
the German shells came. Nothing was to 
be saved that shrapnel could destroy. Shrap- 
nel is futile against the body of the Ca- 
thedral, as is proved by the fact that 3000 
shells have fallen on or near it in a day and 
a night. If the Germans used high-explo- 
sive, one might beheve that they had some 
deep religious aim necessitating the non- 
existence of the Cathedral. But they do not 
use high-explosive here. Shrapnel merely 
and uselessly torments. 

When I first saw the Cathedral I was told 
that there had been calm for several days. 
I know that German agents in neutral coun- 
tries constantly deny that the Cathedral is 
now shelled. Wlien I saw the Cathedral 
again the next morning, five shells had just 
been aimed at it. I inspected the hole ex- 
cavated by a 155-mm. shell at the foot of the 

[69] 



OVER THERE 



eastern extremity, close to the walls. This 
hole was certainly not there when I made 
the circuit of the Cathedral on the previous 
evening. It came into existence at 6.40 a. m., 
and I inspected it at 8.20 a. m., and a news- 
paper boy offered me that morning's paper 
on the very edge of it. A fragment of shell, 
picked up warm by the architect in charge 
of the Cathedral and given to me, is now in 
my pocket. 

We had a luncheon party at Rheims, in 
a certain hotel. This hotel had been closed 
for a time, but the landlady 
A LUNCHEON had taken heart again. The 
PARTY personnel appeared to con- 

sist solely of the landlady 
and a relative. Both women were in mourn- 
ing. They served us themselves, and the 
meal was excellent, though one could get 
neither soda-water nor cigars. Shells had 
greeted the city a few hours earlier, but their 
effect had been only material; they are en- 
tirely ignored by the steadfast inhabitants, 
who do their primitive business in the deso- 
lated, paralysed organism with an indiffer- 

[70] 



RUINS 

ence which is as resigned as it is stoic. Those 
ladies might well have been blown to bits as 
they crossed the courtyard bearing a dish 
of cherries or a bottle of wine. The sun 
shone steadily on the rich foliage of the 
street, and dogs and children rollicked mildly 
beneath the branches. 

Several officers were with us, including 
two Staff Officers. These officers, not be- 
longing to the same unit, had a great deal 
to tell each other and us: so much, that the 
luncheon lasted nearly two hours. Some of 
them had been in the retreat, in the battles 
of the Marne and of the Aisne, and in the 
subsequent trench fighting; none had got a 
scratch. Of an unsurpassed urbanity and 
austerity themselves, forming part of the 
finest civilisation which this world has yet 
seen, thoroughly appreciative of the subtle 
and powerful qualities of the race to which 
they belong, they exhibited a chill and re- 
strained surprise at the manners of the in- 
vaders. One had seen two thousand cham- 
pagne-bottles strewn around a chateau from 
which the invaders had decamped, and the 

[71] 



OYER THERE 



old butler of the house going carefully- 
through the grounds and picking up the 
bottles which by chance had not been opened. 
The method of opening champagne, by the 
way, was a stroke of the sabre on the neck 
of the bottle. The German manner was 
also to lay the lighted cigar on the finest 
table-linen, so that by the burnt holes the 
proprietors might count their guests. An- 
other officer had seen a whole countryside of 
villages littered with orchestrions and ab- 
sinthe-bottles, ground-work of an inter- 
rupted musical and bacchic fete whose 
details must be imagined, like many other 
revolting and scabrous details which no com- 
positor would consent to set up in type, but 
which, nevertheless, are known and form a 
striking part of the unwritten history of the 
attack on civilisation. You may have read 
hints of these things again and again, but no 
amount of previous preparation will soften 
for you the shock of getting them first-hand 
from eye-witnesses whose absolute reliability 
it would be fatuous to question. 

What these men, with their vivid gestures, 

[72] 



EUINS 



bright eyes, and perfect phrasing, most de- 
hght in is personal heroism. And be it 
remembered that, though they do tell a 
funny story about German scouts who, in 
order to do their work, painted themselves 
the green of trees — and then, to complete 
the illusion, when they saw a Frenchman 
began to tremble like leaves — they give full 
value to the courage of the invaders. But, 
of course, it is the courage of Frenchmen 
that inspires their narrations. I was ever 
so faintly surprised by their candid and 
enthusiastic appreciation of the heroism of 
the auxihary services. They were lyrical 
about engine-drivers, telephone-repairers, 
stretcher-bearers, and so on. The story 
which had the most success concerned a 
soldier (a schoolmaster) who in an engage- 
ment got left between the opposing hues, a 
quite defenceless mark for German rifles. 
TVhen a bullet hit him, he cried, '"Five la 
France!" When he was missed he kept 
silent. He was hit again and again, and at 
each wound he cried, ''Vive la Francer He 
could not be killed. At last they turned a 

[73] 



OVER THERE 



machine-gun on him and raked him from 
head to foot. ''Vive la — '' 

It was a long, windy, dusty drive to Arras. 
The straight, worn roads of flinty chalk 

passed for many miles through 
ARRAS country where there was no unmili- 

tary activity save that of the crops 
pushing themselves up. Everything was 
dedicated to the war. Only at one dirty 
little industrial town did we see a large 
crowd of men waiting after lunch to go into 
a factory. These male civilians had a very 
odd appearance; it was as though they had 
been left out of the war by accident, or by 
some surprising benevolence. One thought 
first, "There must be some mistake here." 
But there was probably no mistake. Those 
men were doubtless in the immense machine. 
After we had traversed a more attractive 
agricultural town, with a town-hall whose 
architecture showed that Flanders was not 
very far off, the soil changed and the coun- 
try grew more sylvan and delectable. And 
the Sim shone hotly. Camps alternated with 
orchards, and cows roamed in the camps and 

[74] 



RUINS 

also in the orchards. And among the trees 
could be seen the blue draperies of women 
at work. Then the wires of the field-tele- 
phones and telegraphs on their elegantly 
slim bamboos were running alongside us. 
And once or twice, roughly painted on a bit 
of bare wood, we saw the sign: ''Vers le 
Front f' Why any sign should be necessary 
for such a destination I could not imagine. 
But perhaps humour had entered into the 
matter. At length we perceived Arras in 
the distance, and at a few kilometres it 
looked rather like itself: it might have been 
a living city. 

When, however, you actually reach Arras 
you cannot be deceived for an instant as to 
what has happened to the place. It offers 
none of the transient illusion of Rheims. 
The first street you see is a desolation, empty 
and sinister. Grimy curtains bulge out at 
smashed windows. Everywhere the damage 
of shells is visible. The roadway and the 
pavements are Httered with bits of homes. 
Grass flourishes among the bits. You pro- 
ceed a httle further to a large, circular place j 

[75] 



OYER THERE 



once imposing. Every house in it presents 
the same bhghted aspect. There is no urban 
stir. But in the brief intervals of the deaf- 
ening cannonade can be heard one sound — 
bhnds and curtains fluttering against empty 
window-frames, and perhaps the idle, faint 
banging of a loose shutter. Not even a cat 
walks. We are alone, we and the small 
group of Staff Officers who are acting as 
our hosts. We feel like thieves, like dese- 
crators, impiously prying. 

At the other side of the place a shell has 
dropped before a house and sliced away all 
its front. On the ground floor is the drawing- 
room. Above that is the bedroom, with the 
bed made and the white linen smoothly 
showing. The marvel is that the bed, with 
all the other furniture, does not slide down 
the sloping floor into the street. But every- 
thing remains moveless and placid. The 
bedroom is like a show. It might be the 
bedroom of some famous man exposed to 
worshipping tourists at sixpence a head. A 
few chairs have fallen out of the house, and 
they lie topsy-turvy in the street amid the 

[76] 



RUINS 

debris; no one has thought to touch them. 
In all directions thoroughfares branch forth, 
silent, grass-grown, and ruined. 

"You see the strong fortress I have !" says 
the Commanding Officer with genial sar- 
casm. "You notice its high military value. 
It is open at every end. You can walk into 
it as easily as into a windmill. And yet they 
bombard it. Yesterday they fired twenty 
projectiles a minute for an hour into the 
town. A performance absolutely useless! 
Simple destruction! But they are like 
that!" 

So we went forward further into the city, 
and saw sights still stranger. Of one house 
nothing but the roof was left, the roof made 
a trivimphal arch. EA^erywhere potted 
plants, boxed against walls or suspended 
from window-frames, were freshly bloom- 
ing. All the streets were covered with 
powdered glass. In many streets telegraph 
and telephone wires hung in thick festoons 
like abandoned webs of spiders, or curled 
themselves round the feet; continually one 
had to be extricating oneself from them. 

[77] 



OVER THERE 



Continually came the hollow sound of things 
falling and slipping within the smashed in- 
teriors behind the fa9ades. And then came 
the sound of a baby crying. For this city 
is not, after all, iminhabited. We saw a 
woman coming out of her house and care- 
fully locking the door behind her. Was she 
locking it against shells, or against burglars ? 
Observe those pipes rising through gratings 
in the pavement, and blue smoke issuing 
therefrom. Those pipes are the outward 
sign that such inhabitants as remain have 
transformed their cellars into drawing-rooms 
and bedrooms. We descended into one such 
home. The real drawing-room, on the 
ground-floor, had been invaded by a shell. 
In that apartment richly carved furniture 
was mixed up with pieces of wall and pieces 
of curtain under a thick layer of white dust. 
But the underground home, with its arched 
roof and aspect of extreme solidity, was tidy 
and very snugly complete in all its arrange- 
ments, and the dark entrance to it well pro- 
tected against the hazards of bombardment. 
"Nevertheless^," said the master of the 

[78] 



RUINS 

home, "a 210-mm. shell would penetrate 
everything. It would be the end." 

He threw up his hands with a nonchalant 
gesture. He was a fatalist worthy of his 
city, which is now being besieged and ruined 
not for the first time. The Vandals (I 
mean the original Vandals) laid waste Arras 
again and again. Then the Franks took it. 
Then, in the ninth century, the Normans 
ravaged it; and then Charles the Simple; 
and then Lothair; and then Hugh Capet. 
In the fifteenth century Charles VI. be- 
sieged it for seven weeks, and did not take 
it. Under Louis XI. it was atrociously 
outraged. It revolted, and was retaken by 
assault, its walls razed, its citizens expatri- 
ated, and its name changed. Useless ! The 
name returned, and the citizens. At the end 
of the fifteenth century it fell under Spanish 
rule, and had no kind of peace whatever 
until, after another siege by a large French 
army, it was regained by France in 1640. 
Fourteen years later the House of Austria 
had yet another try for it, and the Arch- 
duke Leopold laid siege to the city. He 

[79] 



OVER THERE 



lost 7000 men, 64 guns, 3000 horses, and all 
his transport, and fled. (Last August was 
the first August in two hundred and sixty 
years which has not witnessed a municipal 
fete in celebration of this affair.) Since 
then Arras has had a tolerably quiet time, 
except during the Revolution. It suffered 
nothing in 1870. It now suffers. And ap- 
parently those inhabitants who have stood 
fast have not forgotten how to suffer; his- 
tory must be in their veins. 

In the street where we first noticed the 
stove-pipes sprouting from the pavement, 
we saw a postman in the regulation costume 
of the French postman, with the regulation 
black, shiny wallet-box hanging over his 
stomach, and the regulation pen behind his 
ear, smartly delivering letters from house to 
house. He did not knock at the doors; he 
just stuck the letters through the empty 
window- frames. He was a truly remark- 
able sight. 

Then we arrived by a curved street at the 
Cathedral of St. Vaast. St. Vaast, who 
preached Christianity after it had been for- 

[80] 




INTERIOR OF ARRAS CATHEDRAL BOMBARDED AND ON FIRE 



"Photographs and 'pictures of Arras Cathedral 
ought to be cherished by German commanders, for 
they have accomplished nothing more austerely 
picturesque, more religiously impressive, more 
idiotically sacrilegious, more exquisitely futile, than 
their achievement here.'' [Page 81] 



RUINS 



gotten in Arras, is all over the district in 
the nomenclature of places. Nobody among 
the dilettanti has a good word to say for 
the Cathedral, which was built in the latter 
half of the eighteenth and the first half of 
the nineteenth centuries, and which exhibits ' 
a kind of simple baroque style, with Corin- 
thian pillars in two storeys. But Arras 
Cathedral is the most majestic and striking 
ruin at the Front. It is superlatively well 
placed on an eminence by itself, and its 
dimensions are tremendous. It towers over 
the city far more imposingly than Chartres 
Cathedral towers over Chartres. The pale 
simplicity of its enormous lines and surfaces 
renders it better suited for the martyrdom 
of bombardment than any Gothic building 
could possibly be. The wounds are clearly 
visible on its flat f a9ades, uncomplicated by 
much carving and statuary. They are ter- 
rific wounds, yet they do not appreciably 
impair the ensemble of the fane. Photo- 
graphs and pictures of Arras Cathedral 
ought to be cherished by German com- 
manders, for they have accomplished nothing 

[81] 



OVER THERE 



more austerely picturesque, more religiously 
impressive, more idiotically sacrilegious, 
more exquisitely futile than their achieve- 
ment here. And they are adding to it 
weekly. As a spectacle, the Cathedral of 
Rheims cannot compare with the Cathedral 
of Arras. 

In the north transept a 325-mm. shell has 
knocked a clean hole through which a masto- 
don might wriggle. Just opposite this 
transept, amid universal wreckage, a cafe 
is miraculously preserved. Its glass, mugs, 
counters, chairs, and ornaments are all there, 
covered with white dust, exactly as they 
were left one night. You could put your 
hand through a window aperture and pick 
up a glass. Close by, the lovely rafter-work 
of an old house is exposed, and, within, a 
beam has fallen from the roof to the ground. 
This beam is burning. The flames are in- 
dustriously eating away at it, like a tiger 
gnawing in tranquil content at its prey which 
it has dragged to a place of concealment. 
There are other fires in Arras, and have 
been for some days. But what are you to 

[82] 



RUINS 



do? A step further on is a greengrocer's 
shop, open and doing business. 

We gradually circled round the Cathedral 
until we arrived at the Town Hall, built in 
the sixteenth century, very carefully re- 
stored in the nineteenth, and knocked to 
pieces in the twentieth. We approached it 
from the back, and could not immediately 
perceive what had happened to it, for later 
erections have clustered round it, and some 
of these still existed in their main outlines. 
In a great courtyard stood an automobile, 
which certainly had not moved for months. 
It was a wreck, overgrown with rust and 
pustules. This automobile well symbolised 
the desolation, open and concealed, by which 
it was surrounded. A touchingly forlorn 
thing, dead and deaf to the never-ceasing, 
ever-reverberating chorus of the guns! 

To the right of the Town Hall, looking 
at it from the rear, we saw a curving double 
row of mounds of brick, stone, and refuse. 
Understand: these had no resemblance to 
houses ; they had no resemblance to anything 
whatever except mounds of brick, stone, and 

[83] 



OYER THERE 



refuse. The sight of them acutely tickled 
my curiosity. "What is this?" 

"It is the principal business street in 
Arras." 

The mind could picture it at once — one of 
those narrow, winding streets which in 
ancient cities perpetuate the most ancient 
habits of the citizens, maintaining their com- 
mercial pre-eminence in the face of all town- 
planning ; a street leading to the Town Hall ; 
a dark street full of jewellers' shops and 
ornamented women and correctness and the 
triumph of correctness; a street of the 
"best" shops, of high rents, of famous names, 
of picturesque signs; a street where the 
wheels of traffic were continually inter- 
locking, but a street which would not, under 
any consideration, have widened itself by 
a single foot, because its narrowness was 
part of its prestige. Well, German gunnery 
has brought that street to an end past all 
resuscitation. It may be rebuilt — it will 
never be the same street. 

"What's the name of the street?" I asked. 

None of the officers in the party could 

[84] 



RUINS 

recall the name of the principal business 
street in Arras, and there was no citizen 
within hail. The very name had gone, like 
the forms of the houses. I have since 
searched for it in guides, encyclopasdias, and 
plans; but it has escaped me — ^withdrawn 
and lost, for me, in the depths of history. 

The street had suffered, not at all on its 
own account, but because it happened to be 
in the hne of fire of the Town Hall. It 
merely received some portion of the bless- 
ings which were intended for the To^vn Hall, 
but which overshot their mark. The Town 
Hall (like the Cathedrals here and at 
Rheims) had no military interest or value, 
but it was the finest thing in Arras, the most 
loved thing, an irreplaceable thing; and 
therefore the Germans made a set at it, as 
they made a set at the Cathedrals. It is just 
as if, having got an aim on a soldier's baby, 
they had started to pick off its hands and 
feet, saying to the soldier: "Yield, or we 
will finish your baby." Either the military 
ratiocination is thus, or the deed is simple 
lunacy. 

• [85] 



OYER THERE 



When we had walked round to the front 
of the Town Hall we were able to judge to 
what extent the beautiful building had 
monopolised the interest of the Germans. 
The Town Hall stands at the head of a 
magnificent and enormous arcaded square, 
uniform in architecture, and no doubt dating 
from the Spanish occupation. Seeing this 
square, and its scarcely smaller sister a little 
further on, you realise that indeed you are 
in a noble city. The square had hardly been 
touched by the bombardment. There had 
been no shells to waste on the square while 
the more precious Town Hall had one stone 
left upon another. From the lower end of 
the square, sheltered from the rain by the 
arcade, I made a rough sketch of what re- 
mains of the Town Hall. Comparing this 
sketch with an engraved view taken from 
exactly the same spot, one can see graphic- 
ally what had occurred. A few arches of 
the ground-floor colonnade had survived in 
outline. Of the upper part of the fa9ade 
nothing was left save a fragment of wall 
showing two window-holes. The rest of the 

[86] 



RUINS 

fa9ade and the whole of the roof, was abol- 
ished. The later building attached to the 
left of the facade had completely disap- 
peared. The carved masonry of the earlier 
building to the right of the facade had sur- 
vived in a state of severe mutilation. The 
belfry which, rising immediately behind the 
Town Hall, was once the highest belfry in 
France (nearly 250 feet), had vanished. 
The stump of it, jagged like the stump of a 
broken tooth, obstinately persisted, sticking 
itself up to a level a few feet higher than 
the former level of the crest of the roof. 
The vast ruin was heaped about with refuse. 
Arras is not in Germany. It is in France. 
I mention this fact because it is notorious 
that Germany is engaged in a defensive war, 
and in a war for the upholding of the highest 
civilisation. The Germans came all the way 
across Belgium, and thus far into France, 
in order to defend themselves against attack. 
They defaced and destroyed all the beauties 
of Arras, and transformed it into a scene 
of desolation unsurpassed in France, so that 
the highest civihsation might remain secure 

[87] 



OVEE THERE 



and their own hearths intact. One wonders 
what the Germans would have done had 
they been fighting, not a war of defence and 
civiHsation, but a war of conquest and bar- 
barism. The conjecture may, perhaps, 
legitimately occupy the brains of citizens. 
In any case, the French Government would 
do well to invite to such places as Arras, 
Soissons, and Senlis groups of Mayors of 
the cities of all countries, so that these august 
magistrates may behold for themselves and 
realise in their souls what defensive war and 
the highest civilisation actually do mean 
when they come to the point. 

Personally, I am against a policy of re- 
prisals, and yet I do not see how Germany 
can truly appreciate what she has done un- 
less an object-lesson is created for her out 
of one of her own cities. And she emphatic- 
ally ought to appreciate what she has done. 
One city would suffice. If, at the end of the 
war, Cologne were left as Arras was when I 
visited it, a definite process of education 
would have been accomplished in the Teu- 
tonic mind. The event would be hard on 

[88] 




THE RUINED NAVE OF SOISSONS CATHEDRAL 

''The French Government would do well to invite 
to such 'places as Arras, Soissons and Senlis groups 
of Mayors of the cities of all countries, so that these 
august magistrates may behold for themselves and 
realize in their souls what defensive war and the 
highest civilization actually do mean when they 
come to the point" [Page 88] 



RUINS 

Cologne, but not harder than the other 
event has been on Arras. Moreover, it is 
held, I believe, that the misfortunes of war 
bring out all that is finest in the character 
of a nation, and that therefore war, with 
its sweet accompaniments, is a good and a 
necessary thing. I am against a policy of 
reprisals, and yet — such is human nature — 
having seen Arras, I would honestly give a 
year's income to see Cologne in the same 
condition. And to the end of my life I shall 
feel cheated if Cologne or some similar Ger- 
man town is not in fact ultimately reduced 
to the same condition. This state of mind 
comes of seeing things with your own eyes. 
Proceeding, we walked through a mile or 
two of streets in which not one house was 
inhabited nor undamaged. Some of these 
streets had been swept, so that at the first 
glance they seemed to be streets where all 
the citizens were indoors, reflecting behind 
drawn blinds and closed shutters upon some 
incredible happening. But there was no- 
body indoors. There was nobody in the 
whole quarter — only ourselves ; and we were 

[89] 



OVER THERE 



very unhappy and unquiet in the sohtude, 
Ahnost every window was broken; every 
wall was chipped; chunks had been knocked 
out of walls, and at intervals there was no 
wall. One house showed the different 
paperings of six rooms all completely ex- 
posed to the gaze. The proprietor evidently 
had a passion for anthracite stoves; in each 
of the six fireplaces was an anthracite stove, 
and none had fallen* The post-office was 
shattered. 

Then the railway station of Arras! A 
comparatively new railway station, built by 
the Compagnie du Nord in 1898. A rather 
impressive railway station. The great 
paved place in front of it was pitted with 
shell-holes of various sizes. A shell had just 
grazed the elaborate facade, shaving orna- 
ments and mouldings off it. Every pane of 
glass in it was smashed. All the ironwork 
had a rich brown rust. The indications for 
passengers were plainly visible. Here you 
must take your ticket ; here you must register 
your baggage; here you must wait. We 
could look through the station as through 

[90] 



RUINS 



the ribs of a skeleton. The stilhiess of it 
under the rain and under the echoes of the 
tireless artillery was horrible. It was the 
most unnatural, ghostly, ghastly railway 
station one could imagine. As within the 
station, so on the platforms. All the glass 
of the shelters for passengers was broken to 
little bits; the ironwork thickly encrusted. 
The signals were unutterably forlorn in 
their ruin. And on the lines themselves 
rampant vegetation had grown four feet 
high — a conquering jungle. The defence 
of German soil is a mighty and a far-reach- 
ing affair. 

This was on July 7, 1915. 



[91] 



CHAPTER FOUR 
AT GRIPS 



/ 



CHAPTER IV 

AT GRIPS 

I HAVE before referred to the apparent 
vagueness and casualness of war on its 

present scarcely conceivable 
AKTiLLERY scale. When you are with a 

Staff Officer, you see almost 
everything. I doubt not that certain mat- 
ters are hidden from you; but, broadly 
speaking, you do see all that is to be seen. 
Into the mind of the General, which con- 
ceals the strategy that is to make history, of 
course you cannot peer. The General is full 
of interesting talk about the past and about 
the present, but about the future he breathes 
no word. If he is near the centre of the 
front he will tell you blandly, in answer to 
your question, that a great movement may 
not improbably be expected at the wings. 
If he is at either of the wings he will tell 
you blandly that a great movement may not 
improbably be expected at the centre. You 

[95] 



OVER THERE 



are not disappointed at his attitude, because 
you feel when putting them that such ques- 
tions as yours deserve such answers as his. 
But you are assuredly disappointed at not 
being able to comprehend even the present 
— what is going on around you, under your 
eyes, deafening your ears. 

For example, I hear the sound of guns. I 
do not mean the general sound of guns, 
which is practically continuous round the 
horizon, but the particular sound of some 
specific group of guns. I ask about them. 
Sometimes even Staff Officers may hesitate 
before deciding whether they are enemy 
guns or French guns. As a rule, the civilian 
distinguishes an enemy shot by the sizzling, 
affrighting sound of the projectile as it 
rushes through the air towards him ; whereas 
the French projectile, rushing away from 
him, is out of hearing before the noise of the 
gun's explosion has left his ears. But I may 
be almost equidistant between a group of 
German and a group of French guns. 

When I have learnt what the guns are 
and their calibre, and, perhaps, even their 

[96] 



AT GRIPS 



approximate situation on the large-scale 
Staff map, I am not much nearer the realisa- 
tion of them. Actually to find them might 
be half a day's work, and when I have found 
them I have simply found several pieces of 
mechanism each hidden in a kind of hut, 
functioning quite privately and disconnect- 
edly by the aid of a few perspiring men. 
The affair is not like shooting at anything. 
A polished missile is shoved into the gun. 
... A horrid bang — the missile has disap- 
peared, has simply gone. Where it has gone, 
what it has done, nobody in the hut seems 
to care. There is a telephone close by, but 
only numbers and formula — and perhaps 
an occasional rebuke — come out of the tele- 
phone, in response to which the perspiring 
men make minute adjustments in the gun 
or in the next missile. 

Of the target I am absolutely ignorant, 
and so are the perspiring men. I am free 
to go forth and look for the target. It is 
pointed out to me. It may be a building or 
a group of buildings; it may be something 
else. At best, it is nothing but a distant 

[97] 



OVER THERE 



spot on a highly complex countryside. I 
see a faint puff of smoke, seemingly as 
harmless as a feather momentarily floating. 
And I think: Can any reasonable person 
expect that those men with that noisy con- 
trivance in the enclosed hut away back shall 
plant a mass of metal into that far-off tiny 
red patch of masonry lost in the vast land- 
scape? And, even if by chance they do, for 
what reason has that particular patch been 
selected? What influence could its destruc- 
tion have on the mighty course of the 
struggle? . . . Thus it is that war seems 
vague and casual, because a mere fragment 
of it defeats the imagination, and the bits 
of even the fragment cannot be fitted to- 
gether. Why, I have stood in the first-line 
trench itself and heard a fusillade all round 
me, and yet have seen nothing and under- 
stood nothing of the action! 

***** 

It is the same with the movements of 
troops. For example, I slept in a small 
town behind the front, and I was wakened 
up, not, as often, by an aeroplane, but by a 

[98] 



AT GRIPS 

tremendous shaking and throbbing of the 
hotel. This went on for a long time, from 

just after dawn till about six 
AEMiES IN o'clock, when it stopped, only 
MOVEMENT to recommence after a few 

minutes. I got up, and found 
that, in addition to the hotel, the whole 
town was shaking and throbbing. A regi- 
ment was passing through it in auto-buses. 
Each auto-bus held about thirty men, and 
the vehicles rattled after one another at a 
distance of at most thirty yards. The auto- 
buses were painted the colour of battle-ships, 
and were absolutely uniform except that 
some had permanent and some only tem- 
porary roofs, and some had mica windows 
and some only holes in the sides. All car- 
ried the same number of soldiers, and in all 
the rifles were stacked in precisely the same 
fashion. When one auto-bus stopped, all 
stopped, and the soldiers waved and smiled 
to girls at windows and in the street. The 
entire town had begun its day. 'No matter 
how early you arise in these towns, the town 
has always begun its day. 

[99] 



OVER THERE 



V" 



The soldiers in their pale-blue uniforms 
were young, lively, high-spirited, and very 
dusty ; their moustaches, hair, and ears were 
noticeably coated with dust. Evidently 
they had been travelling for hours. The 
auto-buses kept appearing out of the sun- 
shot dust-cloud at the end of the town, and 
disappearing round the curve by the Town 
Hall. Occasionally an officer's automobile, 
or a car with a couple of nurses, would inter- 
vene momentarily ; and then more and more 
and more auto-buses, and still more. The 
impression given is that the entire French 
Army is passing through the town. The 
rattle and the throbbing and the shaking 
get on my nerves. At last come two break- 
down-vans, and the procession is finished. 
I cannot believe that it is really finished, but 
it is ; and the silence is incredible. . . . Well, 
I have seen only a couple of regiments go 
by. Out of the hundreds of regiments in 
the French Army, just two! But whence 
they had come, what they had done, whither 
they were travelling, what they were in- 
tended to do — ^nobody could tell me. They 

[100] 



AT GBIPS 



had an air as casual and vague and aimless 
as a flight of birds across a landscape. 

There were more picturesque pilgrimages 
than that. One of the most picturesque and 
touching spectacles I saw at the front was 
the march of a regiment of the line mto 
another little country town on a very fine 
summer morning. First came the regi- 
mental hand. The brass instruments were 
tarnished; the musicians had all sorts of 
paper packages tied to their knapsacks. 
Besides being musicians they were real 
soldiers, in war-stained uniforms. They 
marched with an air of fatigue. But the 
tune they played was bright enough. Fol- 
lowed some cyclists, keeping pace with the 
marchers. Then an officer on a horse. Then 
companies of the regiment. The stocks of 
many of the rifles were wrapped m dirty 
rags. Every man carried all that was his in 
the campaign, including a pair of field- 
glasses. Every man was piled up with im- 
pedimenta—broken, torn, soiled and cobbled 
impedimenta. And every man was very, 
very tired. A young officer on foot could 

[101] 



OVER THEEE 



scarcely walk. He moved in a kind of 
trance, and each step was difficult. He may 
have been half asleep. At intervals a tri- 
angular sign was borne aloft — red, blue, or 
some other tint. These signs indicated the 
positions of the different companies in the 
trenches. (Needless to say that the regi- 
ment had come during the night from a long 
spell of the trenches — but what trenches?) 
Then came the gorgeous regimental colours, 
and every soldier in the street saluted them, 
and every civilian raised his hat. 

I noticed more and more that the men 
were exhausted, were at the limit of their 
endurance. Then passed a group which was 
quite fresh. A Red Cross detachment! No 
doubt they had had very little to do. After 
them a few horses, grey and white; and 
then field-kitchens and equipment-carts. 
And then a machine-gun on a horse's back; 
others in carts; pack-mules with ammuni- 
tion-boxes; several more machine-gun sec- 
tions. And then more field-kitchens. In 
one of these the next meal was actually pre- 
paring, and steam rose from under a great 

[ 102 ] 



AT GRIPS 



iron lid. On every cart was a spare wheel 
for emergencies ; the hub of every wheel was 
plaited round with straw; the harness was 
partly of leather and partly of rope ending 
in iron hooks. Later came a long Red Cross 
van, and after it another field-kitchen en- 
cumbered with bags and raw meat and 
strange oddments, and through the inter- 
stices of the pile, creeping among bags and 
raw meat, steam gently moimted, for a meal 
was maturing in that perambulating kitchen 
also. Lastly, came a cart full of stretchers 
and field-hospital apparatus. The regiment, 
its music still faintly audible, had gone by — 
self-contained, self-supporting. There was 
no showiness of a review, but the normal 
functioning, the actual dailiness, of a line 
regiment as it lives strenuously in the midst 
of war. My desire was that the young 
officer in a trance should find a good bed 
instantly. The whole thing was fine ; it was 
pathetic; and, above all, it was mysterious. 
What was the part of that regiment in the 
gigantic tactics of Joffre? 

^ y^ y^ ^ y^ 

[103] 



OVER THERE 



However, after a short experience at the 
front one realises that though the conduct 

of the campaign may be mys- 
THE terious, it is neither vague nor 

CONSTANT casual. I remember penetrat- 
VTATCH ing through a large factory into 

a small village which consti- 
tuted one of the latest French conquests. 
An officer who had seen the spot just after 
it was taken, and before it was "organised," 
described to me the appearance of the men 
with their sunken eyes and blackened skins 
on the day of victory. They were all very 
cheerful when I saw them; but how alert, 
how apprehensive, how watchful ! I felt that 
I was in a place where anything might 
happen at any moment. The village and 
the factory were a maze of trenches, re- 
doubts, caves, stairs up and stairs down. 
Machine-guns, barbed wire, enfilading de- 
vices were all ready. When we climbed to 
an attic-floor to look at the German posi- 
tions, which were not fifty yards away, the 
Commandant was in a fever till we came 
down again, lest the Germans might spy us 

[ 104 ] 



AT GRIPS 

and shell his soldiers. He did not so much 
mind them shelling us, but he objected to 
them shelling his men. We came down the 
damaged stairs in safety. 

A way had been knocked longitudinally 
through a whole row of cottages. We went 
along this — it was a lane of watchful figures 
— and then it was whispered to us not to talk, 
for the Germans might hear ! And we peered 
into mines and burrowed and crawled. We 
disappeared into long subterranean passages 
and emerged among a lot of soldiers gaily 
eating as they stood. Close by were a group 
of men practising with hand-grenades made 
harmless for the occasion. I followed the 
Commandant round a corner, and we gazed 
at I forget what. "Don't stay here," said 
the Commandant. I moved away. A second 
after I had moved a bullet struck the wall 
where I had been standing. The entire at- 
mosphere of the place, with its imminent 
sense of danger from an invisible enemy and 
fierce expectation of damaging that enemy, 
brought home to me the grand essential truth 
of the front, namely, that the antagonists 

[105] 



OVER THERE 



are continually at grips, like wrestlers, and 
straining every muscle to obtain the slightest 
advantage. "Casual" would be the very last 
adjective to apply to those activities. 

Once, after a roundabout tour on foot, 
one of the Staff Captains ordered an auto- 
mobile to meet us at the end of a certain 
road. Part of this road was exposed to 
German artillery four or five miles off. No 
sooner had the car come down the road than 
we heard the fearsome sizzling of an ap- 
proaching shell. We saw the shell burst 
before the sound of the sizzling had ceased. 
Then came the roar of the explosion. The 
shell was a 77-mm. high-explosive. It fell 
out of nowhere on the road. The German 
artillery methodically searched the exposed 
portion of the road for about half-an-hour. 
The shells dropped on it or close by it at 
intervals of two minutes, and they were 
planted at even distances of about a hundred 
yards up and down the slope. I watched 
the operation from a dug-out close by. It 
was an exact and a rather terrifying opera- 
tion. It showed that the invisible Germans 

[ 106] 



AT GRIPS 



were letting nothing whatever go by; but it 
did seem to me to be a fine waste of ammu- 
nition, and a very stupid appHcation of a 
scientific ideal ; for while shelling it the Ger- 
mans must have noticed that there was 
nothing at all on the road. We naturally 
decided not to go up that road in the car, 
but to skulk through a wood and meet the 
car in a place of safety. The car had, sooner 
or later, to go up the road, because there 
was not another road. The Commandant 
who was with us was a very seasoned ofiicer, 
and he regarded all military duties as abso- 
lute duties. The car must return along that 
road. Therefore, let it go. .The fact that it 
was a car serving solely for the convenience 
of civilians did not influence him. It was a 
military car, driven by a soldier. 

"You may as well go at once," he said to 
the chauffeur. "We will assist at your 
agony. . . . What do you say?" he laugh- 
ingly questioned a subordinate. 

"Ah! My Commandant," said the junior 
ofiicer cautiously, "when it is a question of 
the service — " 

[107] 



OVER THERE 



We should naturally have protested 
against the chauffeur adventuring upon the 
shell-swept road for our convenience; but 
he was diplomatic enough to postpone the 
journey. After a time the shelling ceased, 
and he passed in safety. He told us when 
we met him later for the drive home that 
there were five large holes in the road. 

On another occasion, when we were tramp- 
ing through interminable communication- 
trenches on a slope, a single rash exposure 
of two of our figures above the parapet of 
the trench drew down upon us a bombard- 
ment of high-explosive. For myself, I was 
completely exhausted by the excursion, 
which was nearing its end, and also I was 
faint from hunger. But immediately the 
horrible sizzling sound overhead and an ex- 
plosion just in front made it plain to me 
that we were to suffer for a moment's indis- 
cretion, I felt neither fatigue nor hunger. 
The searching shells fell nearer to us. We 
ran in couples, with a fair distance between 
each couple, according to instructions, along 
the rough, sinuous inequalities of the deep 

[ 108 ] 



AT GRIPS 



trench. After each visitation we had to lie 
still and count five till all the fragments of 
shell had come to rest. At last a shell seemed 
to drop right upon me. The earth shook 
under me. My eyes and nose were affected 
by the fumes of the explosion. But the 
shell had not dropped right upon me. It 
had dropped a few yards to the left. A 
trench is a wonderful contrivance. Imme- 
diately afterwards, a friend picked up in 
the trench one of the warm shots of the 
charge. It was a many-facetted ball, beau- 
tifully made, and calculated to produce the 
maximum wound. This was the last shell 
to fall. We were safe. But we realised 
once again, and more profoundly, that there 
is nothing casual in the conduct of war. 

^ ^ ^ ^ illlt 

At no place was the continuously intense 
character of the struggle — like that of 
two leviathan wrestlers ever straining their 
hardest at grips — ^more effectually brought 
home to me than in the region known now 
familiarly to the whole world as ISTotre Dame 
de Lorette, from the little chapel that stood 

[109] 



OVER THERE 



on one part of it. An exceedingly ugly 
little chapel it was, according to the picture- 
postcards. There are thou- 
NOTRE DAME sands of widows and orphans 
DE LORETTE Wearing black and regretting 
the past and trembling about 
the future to-day simply because thu in- 
vaders had to be made to give up that 
religious edifice which they had turned to 
other uses. 

The high, thickly wooded land behind the 
front was very elaborately organised for 
living either above ground or under ground, 
according to the circumstances of the day. 
To describe the organisation would be im- 
politic. But it included every dodge. And 
the stores, entombed in safety, comprised 
all things. I remember, for example, stacks 
of hundreds of lamp-chimneys. Naught 
lacked to the completeness of the scene of 
war. There were even prisoners. I saw 
two young Germans under guard in a cabin. 
They said that they had got lost in the 
labyrinth of trenches, and taken a wrong 
turning. And I believe they had. One was 

[110] 




RUINS OF THE HOTEL DE VILLE, ARRAS 



""The Town Hall (like the Cathedrals here and at 
Rheims) had no military interest or value, hut it 
was the finest thing in Arras, the most loved thing, 
an irreplaceable thing." [Page 85] 



AT GRIPS 

a Red Cross man — probably a medical stu- 
dent before, with wine and song and boast- 
ings, he joined his Gott, his Kaiser, and his 
comrades in the great mission of civilisation 
across Belgimn. He was dusty and tired, 
and he looked gloomily at the earthen floor 
of the cabin. Nevertheless, he had a good 
carriage and a passably intelligent face, and 
he was rather handsome. I sympathised 
with this 3^outh, and I do not think that he 
was glad to be a prisoner. Some people 
can go and stare at prisoners, and wreak 
an idle curiosity upon them. I cannot. A 
glance, rather surreptitious, and I must walk 
away. Their humiliation humihates me, 
even be they Prussians of the most offensive 
variety. 

A httle later we saw another prisoner 
being brought in — a miserable, tuberculous 
youth with a nervous trick of the face, thin, 
very dirty, enfeebled, worn out; his uni- 
form torn, stained, bullet-pierced, and 
threadbare. Somebody had given him a 
large himk of bread, which he had put within 
the lining of his tunic ; it bulged out in front 

[111] 



OVER THERE 



like a paunch. Art officer stopped to ques- 
tion him, and while the cross-examination 
was proceeding a curio-hunting soldier came 
up behind and cut a button off the tunic. 
We learnt that the lad was twenty-one years 
of age, and that he had been called up in 
December, 1914. Before assisting in the 
conquest of France he was employed in a 
paper factory. He tried to exhibit gloom, 
but it was impossible for him quite to con- 
ceal his satisfaction in the fact that for him 
the fighting was over. The wretched boy 
had had just about enough of world- 
dominion, and he was ready to let the Hohen- 
zollerns and Junkers finish up the enterprise 
as best they could without his aid. No 
doubt, some woman was his mother. It ap- 
peared to me that he could not live long, 
and that the woman in question might never 
see him again. But every ideal must have 
its victims; and bereavement, which counts 
chief among the well-known advantageous 
moral disciplines of war, is, of course, good 
for a woman's soul. Besides, that woman 
would be convinced that her son died glori- 

[112] 



AT GRIPS 



ously in defence of an attacked Fatherland. 
W^ien we had got clear of prisoners and 
of the innumerable minor tools of war, we 
came to something essential — ^namely, a 
map. This map, which was shown to us 
rather casually in the middle of a wood, was 
a very big map, and by means of different 
coloured chalks it displayed the ground 
taken from the Germans month by month. 
The yellow line showed the advance up to 
May; the blue line showed the further ad- 
vance up to June; and fresh marks in red 
showed graphically a further wresting which 
had occurred only in the previous night. The 
blue line was like the mark of a tide on a 
chart; in certain places it had nearly sur- 
rounded a German position, and shortly the 
Germans would have to retire from that 
position or be cut off. Fam_ous names 
abounded on that map — such as Souchez, 
Ablain St. Nazaire, St. Eloi, Fonds de 
Buval. Being on a very large scale, the 
map covered a comparatively small section 
of the front ; but, so far as it went, it was a 
map to be gazed upon with legitimate pride. 

[113] 



OVER THERE 



The officers regarded it proudly. Eagerly 
they indicated where the main pressures 
were, and where new pressures would come 
later. Their very muscles seemed to be 
strained in the ardour of their terrific inten- 
tion to push out and destroy the invader. 
While admitting, as all the officers I met 
admitted, the great military qualities of the 
enemy, they held towards him a more defi- 
nitely contemptuous attitude than I could 
discover elsewhere. "When the Boches 
attack us," said one of them, "we drive them 
back to their trench, and we take that trench. 
Thus we advance." But, for them, there 
^ was Boche and Boche. It was the Bavarians 
whom they most respected. They deemed 
the Prussians markedly inferior as fighters 
to the Bavarians. The Prussians would not 
hold firm when seriously menaced. The 
Prussians, in a word, would not "stick it." 
Such was the unanimous verdict here. 

Out beyond the wood, on the hillside, in 
the communication-trenches and other 
trenches, we were enabled to comprehend the 
true significance of that phrase uttered so 

[114] 



AT GRIPS 



carelessly by newspaper-readers — Notre 
Dame de Lorette. The whole of the ground 
was in heaps. There was no spot, literally, 
on which a shell had not burst. Vegetation 
was quite at an end. The shells seemed to 
have sterilised the earth. There was not a 
tree, not a bush, not a blade of any sort, not 
a root. Even the rankest weeds refused to 
sprout in the perfect desolation. And this 
was the incomparable soil of France. The 
trenches meandered for miles through the 
pitted brown slopes, and nothing could be 
seen from them but vast encumbrances of 
barbed wire. Knotted metal heaped on the 
unyielding earth! 

The solitude of the communication- 
trenches was appalling, and the continuous 
roar of the French seventy-fives over our 
heads did not alleviate it. In the other 
trenches, however, was much humanity, 
some of it sleeping in deep, obscure retreats, 
but most of it acutely alive and interested 
in everything. A Captain with a shabby 
uniform and a strong Southern accent told 
us how on March 9 he and his men defended 

[115] 



OVER THERE 



their trench in water up to the waist and 
lumps of ice in it knocking against their 
bodies. 

"I was summoned to surrender," he 
laughed. "I did not surrender. We had 
twenty killed and twenty-four with frost- 
bitten feet as a result of that affair. Yes — 
March 9." 

March 9, 1915, obviously divided that 
officer's life into two parts, and not un- 
naturally ! 

A little further on we might hear an 
officer speaking somewhat ardently into a 
telephone — 

"What are they doing with that gun? 
They are shooting all over the shop. Tell 
them exactly — " 

Still a little further on, and another 
officer would lead us to a spot where we 
could get glimpses of the plain. What a 
plain! Pit-heads, superb vegetation, and 
ruined villages — tragic villages illustrating 
the glories and the transcendent common- 
sense of war and invasion. That place over 
there is Souchez — familiar in all mouths 

[116] 



AT GRIPS 

from Arkansas to Moscow for six months 
past. What an object! Look at St. Eloi! 
Look at Angres! Look at Neuville St. 
Vaast! And look at Ablain St. Nazah^e, 
the nearest of all! The village of Ablain 
St. Nazaire seems to consist now chiefly of 
exposed and blackened rafters; what is left 
of the church sticks up precisely like a little 
bleached bone. A vision horrible and in- 
credible in the immense luxuriance of the 
plain! The French have got Ablain St. 
Nazaire. We may go to Ablain St. Nazaire 
ourselves if we will accept the risks of shell- 
ing. Soldiers were seriously wounded there 
on that very day, for we saw them being 
carried therefrom on stretchers towards the 
motor-ambulance and the hospital. 

After more walking of a very circuitous 
nature, I noticed a few bricks in the monot- 
onous expanse of dwarf earth-mounds made 
by shells. 

"Hello!" I said. "Was there a cottage 
here?" 

No! What I had discovered was the 
illustrious chapel of Notre Dame de Lorette. 

[117] 



OVER THERE 



Then we were in a German trench which 
the French had taken and transformed into 
one of their own trenches by turning its 
face. It had a more massive air than the 
average French trench, and its cellarage, if 
I may use this civilian word, was deeper 
than that of any French trench. The officers 
said that often a German trench was taken 
before the men resting in those profound 
sleeping-holes could get to the surface, and 
that therefore they only emerged in order 
to be killed or captured. 

After more heavy trudging we came to 
trenches abandoned by the Germans and not 
employed by the French, as the front had 
moved far beyond them. The sides were 
dilapidated. Old shirts, bits of uniform, 
ends of straps, damaged field-glass cases, 
broken rifles, useless grenades lay all about. 
Here and there was a puddle of greenish 
water. Millions of flies, many of a sinister 
bright burnished green, were busily swarm- 
ing. The forlornness of these trenches was 
heartrending. It was the most dreadful 
thing thatT saw at the front, surpassing the 

[ 118 ] 



AT GRIPS 



forlornness of any destroyed village what- 
soever. And at intervals in the ghastly 
residue of war arose a smell unlike any other 
smell. ... A leg could be seen sticking out 
of the side of the trench. We smelt a num- 
ber of these smells, and saw a number of 
these legs. Each leg was a fine leg, well- 
clad, and superbly shod in almost new boots 
with nail-protected soles. Each leg was a 
human leg attached to a himian body, and 
at the other end of the body was presumably 
a face crushed in the earth. Two strokes 
with a pick, and the corpses might have been 
excavated and decently interred. But not 
one had been touched. Buried in frenzied 
haste by amateur, imperilled grave-diggers 
with a military purpose, these dead men 
decayed at leisure amid the scrap-heap, the 
cess-pit, the infernal squalor which once had 
been a neat, clean, scientific German earth- 
work, and which still earlier had been part 
of a fair countryside. The French had 
more urgent jobs on hand than the sepulture 
of these victims of a caste and an ambition. 
So they liquefied into corruption in their 

[119] 



OVER THERE 



everlasting boots, proving that there is noth- 
ing hke leather. They were a symbol. With 
alacrity we left them to get forward to the 
alert, straining life of war. 



[ 120] 



CHAPTER FIVE 
THE BRITISH LINES 



CHAPTER V 

THE BRITISH LINES 

You should imagine a large plain, but 
not an empty plain, nor a plain entirely 

without hills. There are a few 
THE hills, including at least one very 
PLAIN fine eminence (an agreeable old 

town on the top), with excellent 
views of the expanse. The expanse is con- 
siderably diversified. In the first place it 
is very well wooded; in the second place it 
is very well cultivated; and in the third 
place it is by no means uninhabited. Vil- 
lages abound in it; and small market towns 
are not far off each other. These places 
are connected by plenty of roads (often 
paved) and canals, and by quite an average 
mileage of railways. See the plain from 
above, and the chief effect is one of trees. 
The rounded tops of trees everywhere ob- 
scure the view, and out of them church- 
towers stick up; other architecture is only 

[123] 



OVER THERE 



glimpsed. The general tints are green and 
grey, and the sky as a rule is grey to match. 
Finally the difference between Northern 
France and Southern Belgium is marked 
only by the language of shop and cafe signs ; 
in most respects the two sections of the 
Front resemble each other with extraor- 
dinary exactitude. 

The British occupation — which is marked 
of course by high and impressive cordiality 
— is at once superficially striking and subtly 
profound. 

"What do you call your dog?" I asked a 
ragamuffin who was playing with a nice little 
terrier in a village street where we ate an 
al fresco meal of jam-sandwiches with a 
motor-car for a buffet. 

He answered shyly, but with pride: 

"Tommy." 

The whole country-side is criss-crossed 
with field telegraph and telephone wires. 
Still more spectacular, everywhere there are 
traffic directions. And these directions are 
very large and very curt. "Motor-lorries 
dead slow," you see in immense characters 

[124] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



in the midst of the foreign scene. And at all 
the awkward street corners in the towns a 
soldier directs the traffic. Not merely in 
the towns, but in many and many a rural 
road you come across a rival of the Strand. 
For the traffic is tremendous, and it is almost 
all mechanical transport. You cannot go far 
without encountering, not one or two, but 
dozens and scores of motor-lorries, which, 
after the leviathan manner of motor-lorries, 
occupy as much of the road as they can. 
When a string of these gets mixed up with 
motor-cars, a few despatch-riders on motor- 
cycles, a peasant's cart, and a company on 
the march, the result easily surpasses Picca- 
dilly Circus just before the curtains are 
rising in West End theatres. Blocks may 
and do occur at any moment. Out of a 
peaceful rustic soHtude you may run round 
a curve straight into a block. The motor- 
lorries constitute the difficulty, not always 
because they are a size too large for the 
country, but sometimes because of the 
human nature of Tommies. The rule is that 
on each motor-lorry two Tommies shall ride 

[125] 



OVER THERE 



in front and one behind. The solitary one 
behind is cut off from mankind, and accord- 
ingly his gregarious instinct not infrequently 
makes him nip on to the front seat in search 
of companionship. When he is established 
there impatient traffic in the rear may 
screech and roar in vain for a pathway; 
nothing is so deaf as a motor-lorry. The 
situation has no disadvantage for the trio 
in front of the motor-lorry until a Staff 
Officer's car happens to be inconvenienced. 
Then, when the Staff Officer does get level, 
there is a short, sharp scene, a dead silence, 
and the offender creeps back, a stricken 

sinner, to his proper post. 

***** 

The encumbered and busy roads, and the 
towns crammed with vehicles and vibrating 

with military activity, produce 
GENERALS upon you sucli an overwhelming 
AND impression of a vast and com- 

STAFFS plex organisation that your 

thought rushes instantly to the 
supreme controller of that organisation, the 
man ultiraately responsible for all of it. He 

[126] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



does not make himself invisible. It becomes 
known that he will see you at a certain hour. 
You arrive a few minutes before that hour. 
The building is spacious, and its Gallic 
aspect is intensified by the pure Anglo- 
Saxonism of its terrific inhabitants. In a 
large outer office you are presented to the 
various brains of the Expeditionary Force, 
all members of the General Staff — famous 
names among them, celebrities, specialists, 
illustrious with long renown. They walk 
in and out, and they sit smoking and chat- 
ting, as if none of them was anybody in 
particular. And as a fact, you find it a 
little difficult to appreciate them at their 
lawful worth, because you are aware that 
in the next room, behind those double doors, 
is he at whose nod the greatest among them 
tremble. 

"The Commander-in-Chief will see you." 
You go forward, and I defy you not to 
be daunted. 

The inner chamber has been a drawing- 
room. It still is partially a drawing-room. 
The silk panels on the walls have remained, 

[127] 



OVER THERE 



and in one corner a grand piano lingers. 
In the middle is a plain table bearing a map 
on a huge scale. There he is, the legendary 
figure. You at last have proof that he 
exists. He comes towards the door to meet 
you. A thick-set man, not tall, with small 
hands and feet, and finger-nails full of 
character. He has a short white moustache, 
and very light-coloured eyes set in a ruddy 
complexion. His chin is noticeable. He is 
not a bit dandacal. He speaks quietly and 
grimly and reflectively. He is a preoccupied 
man. He walks a little to and fro, pausing 
between his short, sparse sentences. When 
he talks of the Germans he has a way of 
settling his head and neck with a slight de- 
fiant shake well between his shoulders. I 
have seen the gesture in experienced boxers 
and in men of business when openly or im- 
plicitly challenged. It is just as if he had 
said: "Wait a bit! I shall get even with 
that lot — and let no one imagine the con- 
trary!" From the personality of the man 
there emanates all the time a pugnacious and 
fierce doggedness. . . . After he has form- 

[128] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



ally welcomed you into the meshes of his 
intimidating organisation, and made a few 
general observations, he says, in a new tone : 
"Well — ," and you depart. And as you 
pass out of the building the thought in your 
mind is: 

"I have seen him !" 

After the Commander-in-Chief there are 
two other outstanding and separately exist- 
ing notabilities in connection with the Gen- 
eral Staff. One is the Quartermaster- 
General, who superintends the supply of all 
material; and the other is the Adjutant- 
General, who superintends the supply of 
men. With the latter is that formidable 
instrument of authority, the Grand Provost 
Marshal, who superintends behaviour and 
has the power of life and death. Each of 
these has his Staff, and each is housed simi- 
larly to the Commander-in-Chief. Then 
each Army (for there is more than one army 
functioning as a distinct entity) — each 
Army has its Commander with his Staff. 
And each Corps of each Army has its Com- 
mander with his Staff. And each Division 

[ 129 ] 



OVER THERE 



of each Corps of each Army has its Com- 
mander with his Staff. And each Brigade 
of each Division of each Corps of each Army 
has its Commander with his Staff; but 
though I met several Brigadier- Generals, I 
never saw one at his headquarters with his 
Staff. I somehow could not penetrate lower 
than the entity of a Division. I lunched, 
had tea, and dined at the headquarters of 
various of these Staffs, with a General as 
host. They were all admirably housed, and 
their outward circumstances showed a 
marked similarity. The most memorable 
thing about them was their unending 
industry. 

"You have a beautiful garden," I said to 
one General. 

"Yes," he said. "I have never been into 
it." 

He told me that he rose at six and went 
to bed at midnight. 

As soon as coffee is over after dinner, and 
before cigars are over, the General will say : 

"I don't wish to seem inhospitable, but — " 

And a few minutes later you may see a 
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THE BRITISH LINES 



large lighted limousine moving off into the 
night, bearing Staff Officers to their offices 
for the evening seance of work which ends 
at twelve o'clock or thereabouts. 

The complexity and volume of work which 
goes on at even a Divisional Headquarters, 
having dominion over about twenty thou- 
sand full-grown males, may be imagined; 
and that the bulk of such work is of a busi- 
ness nature, including much tiresome routine, 
is certain. Of the strictly military labours 
of Headquarters, that which most agreeably 
strikes the civilian is the photography and 
the map-work. I saw thousands of maps. 
I inspected thick files of maps all showing 
the same square of country under different 
militarv conditions at different dates. And 
I learnt that special maps are regularly cir- 
culated among all field officers. . . . 

The fitting-out and repairing sheds of 
the Royal Flying Corps were superb and 
complete constructions, at once practical 
and very elegant. I visited them in the 
midst of a storm. The equipment was pro- 
digious; the output was prodigious; the 

[131] 



OVER THERE 



organisation was scientific; and the Staff 
was both congenial and impressive. When 
one sees these birdcages full of birds and 
comprehends the spirit of flight, one is less 
surprised at the unimaginable feats which 
are daily performed over there in the sky 
northwards and eastwards. I saw a man 
who flew over Ghent twice a week with the 
regularity of a train. He had never been 
seriously hit. These airmen have a curious 
physical advantage. The noise of their own 
engine, it is said, prevents them from hear- 
ing the explosions of the shrapnel aimed at 

them. 

***** 

The British soldier in France and Flan- 
ders is not a self-supporting body. He 

needs support, and a great 
SUPPLY^ ETC. deal of support. I once saw 

his day's rations set forth on 
a tray, and it seemed to me that I could not 
have consumed them in a week of good 
appetite. The round of meat is flanked by 
plenteous bacon, jam, cheese, and bread. In 
addition there are vegetables, tea, sugar, 

[132] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



salt, and condiments, with occasional butter ; 
and once a week come two ounces of tobacco 
and a box of matches for each ounce. But 
the formidable item is the meat. And then 
the British soldier wants more than food; 
he wants, for instance, fuel, letters, cleanli- 
ness ; he wants clothing, and all the innumer- 
able instruments and implements of war. 
He wants regularly, and all the time. 

Hence you have to imagine wide steady 
streams of all manner of things converging 
upon Northern France not only from 
Britain but from round about the globe. 
The force of an imperative demand draws 
them powerfully in, night and day, as a 
magnet might. It is impossible to trace 
exactly either the direction or the separate 
constituents of these great streams of neces- 
saries. But it is possible to catch them, or 
at any rate one of them, at the most inter- 
esting point of its course : the point at which 
the stream, made up of many converging 
streams, divides suddenly and becomes many 
streams again. 

That point is the rail-head. 
[133] 



OVER THERE 



Now a military rail-head is merely an 
ordinary average little railway station, with 
a spacious yard. There is nothing super- 
ficially romantic about it. It does not even 
mark the end of a line of railway. I have 
in mind one which served as the Headquar- 
ters of a Divisional Supply Column. The 
organism served just one division — out of 
the very many divisions in France and 
Flanders. It was under the command of a 
Major. This Major, though of course in 
khaki and employing the same language and 
general code as a regimental Major, was 
not a bit like a regimental Major. He was 
no more like a regimental Major than I am 
myself. He had a different mentality, out- 
look, preoccupation. He was a man in 
business. He received orders — I use the 
word in the business sense — from the 
Brigades of the Division; and those orders, 
ever varying, had to be executed and de- 
livered within thirty-six hours. Quite prob- 
ably he had never seen a trench; I should 
be neither surprised nor pained to learn that 
he could only hit a haystack with a revolver 

[134] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



by throwing the revolver at the haystack. 
His subordinates resembled him. Strategy, 
artillery-mathematics, the dash of infantry 
charges — these matters were not a bit in 
their line. Nevertheless, when you read in 
a despatch that during a prolonged action 
supplies went regularly up to the Front 
under heavy fire, you may guess that forti- 
tude and courage are considerably in their 
line. These officers think about their arriv- 
ing trains, and about emptying them in the 
shortest space of time ; and they think about 
their motor-lorries and the condition thereof ; 
and they pass their lives in checking lists and 
in giving receipts for things and taking 
receipts for things. Their honour may be 
in a receipt. And all this is the very basis 
of war. 

My Major handled everything required 
for his division except water and ammuni- 
tion. He would have a train full of multi- 
farious provender, and another train full 
of miscellanies — from field-guns to field- 
kitchens — with letters from wives and sweet- 
hearts in between. And all these things came 

[ 135] 



OYER THERE 



to him up the line of railway out of the sea 
simply because he asked for them and was 
ready to give a receipt for them. He was 
not concerned with the magic underlying 
their appearance at his little rail-head; he 
only cared about the train being on time, 
and the lorries being in first-class running 
order. He sprayed out in beneficent streams 
from his rail-head tons of stuff every day. 
Every day he sent out two hundred and 
eighty bags of postal matter to the men 
beyond. The polish on the metallic portions 
of his numerous motor-lorries was uncanny. 
You might hft a bonnet and see the bright 
parts of the engine glittering like the brass 
of a yacht. Dandyism of the Army Service 
Corps ! 

An important part of the organism of 
the rail-head is the Railway Construction 
Section Train. Lines may have to be 
doubled. The Railway Construction Sec- 
tion Train doubles them; it will make new 
railways at the rate of several miles a day; 
it is self-contained, being simultaneously a 
depot, a workshop, and a barracks. 

[136] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



Driving along a road you are liable to see 
rough signs nailed to trees, with such words 
on them as "Forage," "Groceries," "Meat," 
"Bread," etc. Wait a little, and you may 
watch the Divisional Supply at a further 
stage. A stream of motor-lorries — one of 
the streams sprayed out from the rail-head 
— will halt at those trees and miload, and 
the stuff which they unload will disappear 
like a dream and an illusion. One moment 
the meat and the bread and all the succu- 
lences are there by the roadside, each by its 
proper tree, and the next they are gone, 
spirited away to camps and billets and 
trenches. Proceed further, and you may 
have the luck to see the mutton which was 
frozen in New Zealand sizzling in an earth- 
oven in a field christened b}^ the soldiers 
with some such name as Hampstead Heath. 
The roasted mutton is a very fine and a 
very appetising sight. But what quanti- 
ties of it! And what an antique way of 
cooking ! 

As regards the non-edible suppKes, the 
engineer's park will stir your imagination. 

[137] 



OVER THERE 



You can discern every device in connection 
with warfare. (To describe them might be 
indiscreet, — it would assuredly be too 
lengthy. ) . . . Telephones such as certainly 
you have never seen! And helmets such as 
you have never seen! Indeed, everything 
that a soldier in full work can require, ex- 
cept ammunition. 

The ammunition-train in process of being 
unloaded is a fearsome affair. You may 
see all conceivable ammunition, from rifle- 
cartridges to a shell whose weight is liable to 
break through the floors of lorries, all on 
one train. And not merely ammunition, but 
a thousand pyrotechnical and other devices; 
and varied bombs. An officer unscrews a 
cap on a metal contraption, and throws it 
down, and it begins to fizz away in the most 
disconcerting manner. And you feel that 
all these shells, all these other devices, are 
simply straining to go off. They are like 
things secretly and terribly alive, waiting 
the tiny gesture which will set them free. 
Officers, handling destruction with the non- 
chalance of a woman handling a hat, may 

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THE BRITISH LINES 



say what they hke — the ammunition train 
is to my mind an unsafe neighbour. And 
the thought of all the sheer brain-power 
which has gone to the invention and perfect- 
ing of those propulsive and explosive ma- 
chines causes you to wonder whether you 

yourself possess a brain at all. 

***** 

You can find everything in the British 
lines except the British Army. The same 
is to be said of the French lines; 
THE but the indiscoverability of the 

HIDDEN British Army is relatively much 
ARMY more striking, by reason of the 
greater richness and complexity 
of the British auxiliary services. You see 
soldiers — you see soldiers everywhere; but 
the immense majority of them are obviously 
engaged in attending to the material needs 
of other soldiers, which other soldiers, the 
fighters, you do not see — or see only in tiny 
detachments or in single units. 

Thus I went for a very long walk, up 
such hills and down such dales as the country 
can show, tramping with a General through 

[139] 



OVER THERE 



exhausting communication-trenches, in order 
to discover two soldiers, an officer and his 
man; and even they were not actual fighters. 
The officer lived in a dug-out with a very 
fine telescope for sole companion. I was 
told that none but the General commanding 
had the right to take me to that dug-out. 
It contained the officer's bed, the day's 
newspapers, the telescope, a few oddments 
hung on pegs pushed into the earthen walls, 
and, of equal importance with the telescope, 
a telephone. Occasionally the telephone 
faintly buzzed, and a very faint, indistin- 
guishable murmur came out of it. But the 
orderly ignored this symptom, explaining 
that it only meant that somebody else was 
talking to somebody else. I had the impres- 
sion of a mysterious underground life going 
on all around me. The officer's telescopic 
business was to keep an eye on a particular 
section of the German front, and report 
everything. The section of front comprised 
sundry features extremely well known by 
reputation to British newspaper readers. I 
must say that the reality of them was dis- 

[ 140 ] 








SHELL FIRE OVER ABLAIN ST NAZAIRE 



"The village of Ahlain St. Nazaire seems to con- 
sist now chiefly of exposed and blackened rafters; 
what is left of the church sticks np precisely like a 
little bleached bone." [Page 117] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



appointing. The inevitable thought was: 
"Is it possible that so much killing has been 
done for such trifling specks of earth?" The 
officer made clear all details to us; he de- 
scribed minutely the habits of the Germans 
as he knew them. But about his own habits 
not a word was said. He was not a human 
being — he was an observer, eternally spying 
through a small slit in the wall of the dug- 
out. What he thought about when he was 
not observing, whether his bed was hard, 
how he got his meals, whether he was bored, 
whether his letters came regularly, what his 
moods were, what was his real opinion of 
that dug-out as a regular home — these very 
interesting matters were not even ap- 
proached by us. He was a short, mild 
officer, with a quiet voice. Still, after we 
had shaken hands on parting, the General, 
who had gone first, turned his bent head 
under the concealing leafage, and nodded 
and smiled with a quite particular cordial 
friendliness. "Good afternoon. Blank," 
said the General to the officer, and the warm 
tone of his voice said : "You know — don't 

[ 141 ] 



OVZE THEJffi 



you. Blank ? — ^how much I appreciate you." 
It was a transient revelation. As, swallowed 
up in trenches, I trudged away from the 
lonely officer, the General, resuming his 
ordinarv worldlv tone, becran to talk about 
London music-halls and Wish TV^-nne and 
other artistes. 

Then, on another occasion I actually saw 
at least twenty fighting men I They were 
not fighting, but they were pretending, 
under dangerous conditions, to fight. They 
had to practise the bombiag of a German 
trench — with real bombs. The young officer 
in charge explained to us the different Idnds 
of bombs. *Tt's all quite safe," he said 
casually, ''until I take this piu out." And 
he took the pin out . . . We saw the Httle 
procession of men that were to do the bomb- 
incr. We saw the trench, with its traverses, 
and we were shown just how it would be 
bombed, traverse by traverse. We saw also 
a ''crater" which was to be bombed and 
stormed. And that was about all we did see. 
The rest was chiefly heariug, because we had 
to take shelter behind such shght eminences 

[142] 



THE BRITISH LINXS 



as a piece of ordinan- waste ground can 
oflFer. Common wayfarers were kept out of 
harm by sentries. We were instructed to 
duck. We ducked. Bang I Bang I Bang! 
Bang I Bang — Bang I Then the mosquito- 
like whine of bits of projectile above our 
heads I Then we ventured to look over, and 
amid wisps of smoke the bombers were rush- 
ing a traverse. Strange to say, none of them 
was killed, or even wounded. 

On still another occasion I saw a whole 
brigade, five or six thousand men, with their 
first-line transport, and two Generals with 
implacable eyes watching them for faults. 
It was a fine, very picturesque display of 
Imperial mihtancy, but too marvellously 
spick-and-span to produce any illusion of 
war. So far as I was concerned, its cliief 
use was to furnish a real conception of num- 
bers. I calculated that if the whole British 
Army passed before my eyes at the same 
brisk rate as that sohtan' and splendid 
brigade, I should have to stare at it night 
and day for about three weeks, without sur- 
cease for meals. This calculation only in- 

[143] 



OVER THERE 



creased my astonishment at the obstinate 
indiscoverabihty of the Army. 

Once I did get the sensation of fighting 
men existing in bulk. It was at the baths 
of a new division — the New Army. I will 
mention in passing that the real enthusiasm 
of Generals concerning the qualities of the 
New Army was most moving — and en- 
heartening. 

The baths establishment was very British 
— ^much more British than any of those oper- 
ating it perhaps imagined. Such a phe- 
nomenon could probably be seen on no other 
front. It had been contrived out of a fairly 
large factory. It was in charge of a quite 
young subaltern, no doubt anxious to go and 
fight, but condemned indefinitely to the 
functions of baths-keeper. In addition to 
being a baths-keeper this young subaltern 
was a laundry-manager; for when bathing 
the soldiers left their underclothing and took 
fresh. The laundry was very large; it em- 
ployed numerous local women and girls at 
four francs a day. It had huge hot drying- 
rooms where the women and girls moved as 

[ 144 ] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



though the temperature was sixty degrees 
instead of being over a hundred. All these 
women and girls were beautiful, all had 
charm, all were more or less ravishing — 
simply because for days we had been living 
in a harsh masculine world — a world of 
motor-lorries, razors, trousers, hob-nailed 
boots, maps, discipline, pure reason, and ex- 
cessively few mirrors. . . . An interesting 
item of the laundry was a glass-covered 
museum of lousy shirts, product of pro- 
longed trench-life in the earlier part of the 
war, and held by experts to surpass all 
records of the kind! 

The baths themselves were huge and 
simple, — a series of gigantic steaming vats 
in which possibly a dozen men lathered 
themselves at once. Here was fighting 
humanity ; you could see it in every gesture. 
The bathers, indeed, appeared to be more 
numerous than they in fact were. Two hun- 
dred and fifty could undress, bathe, and re- 
clothe themselves in an hour, and twelve 
hundred in a morning. Each man, of course, 
would be free to take as many unofficial 

[145] 



OVER THERE 



baths, in tin receptacles and so on, as he 
could privately arrange for and as he felt 
inclined for. Companies of dirty men 
marching to the baths, and companies of 
conceitedly clean men marching from the 
baths, helped to strengthen the ever-growing 
suspicion that a great Army must be hidden 
somewhere in the neighbourhood. 

Nevertheless, I still saw not the ultimate 
destination of all those streams of supply 
which I have described. 

■ale. .de. .alg. AtL jO^l 

I had, however, noted a stream in the 
contrary direction — that is, westwards and 
southwards towards the Channel 
WOUNDED and England. You can first 
trace the beginnings of this 
stream under the sound of the guns (which 
you never see). A stretcher brought to a 
temporary shelter by men whose other pro- 
fession is to play regimental music ; a group 
of men bending over a form in the shelter; 
a glimpse of dressings and the appliances 
necessary for tying up an artery or some 
other absolutely urgent job. That shelter is 

[146] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



called the Aid Post. From it the horizontal 
form goes to (2) the Advanced Dressing 
Station, where more attention is given to 
it; and thence to (3) the Field Ambulance 
proper, where the case is really diagnosed 
and provisionally classed. By this time 
motor-ambulances have been much used; 
and the stream, which was a trickle at the 
Aid Post, has grown wider. 

The next point (4) is the Casualty Clear- 
ing Station. Casualty Clearing Stations 
are imposing affairs. Not until the hori- 
zontal form reaches them can an operation 
in the full sense of the word be performed 
upon it. The Clearing Station that I saw 
could accommodate seven hundred cases, 
and had held nearer eight hundred. It was 
housed in an extensive public building. It 
employed seven surgeons, and I forget how 
many dressers. It had an abdominal ward, 
where cases were kept until they could take 
solid food ; and a head ward ; and an officers' 
ward ; immense stores ; a Church of England 
chapel; and a shoot down which mattresses 
with patients thereon could be slid in case 

[147] 



OVER THERE 



of fire. Nearly seven hundred operations 
had been performed in it during the war. 
Nevertheless, as the young Colonel in charge 
said to me: "The function of a Clearing 
Station is to clear. We keep the majority 
of the cases only a few hours." Thence the 
horizontal forms pass into (5) Ambulance 
Trains. But besides Ambulance Trains 
there are Ambulance barges, grand vessels 
flying the Union Jack and the Red Cross, 
with lifts, electric light, and an operating- 
table. They are towed by a tug to the coast 
through convenient canals. 

You may catch the stream once more, and 
at its fullest, in (6) the splendid hospitals 
at Boulogne. At Boulogne the hospital 
laundry work is such that it has overpowered 
the town and it has to be sent to England. 
But even at Boulogne, where the most solid 
architecture, expensively transformed, gives 
an air of utter permanency to the hospitals, 
the watchword is still to clear, to pass the 
cases on. The next stage (7) is the Hos- 
pital-Ship, specially fitted out, waiting in 
the harbour for its complement. When the 

[148] 



THE BRITISH LINES 



horizontal forms leave the ship they are in 
England; they are among us, and the great 
stream divides into many streams, just as 
at the rail-head at the other end the great 
stream of supply divides into many streams, 
and is lost. . . . 

Nor are men the only beings cared for. 
One of the strangest things I saw at Bou- 
logne was a horse-hospital, consisting of a 
meadow of many acres. Those who imagine 
that horses are not used in modern war 
should see the thousands of horses tethered 
in that meadow. Many if not most of them 
were suffering from shell woimds, and the 
sufferers were rather human. I saw a horse 
operated on under chloroform. He refused 
to come to after the operation was over, and 
as I left he was being encouraged to do so 
by movements of the limbs to induce respira- 
tion. Impossible, after that, to think of 

him as a mere horse ! 

* * * * * 

But before I left the British lines I did 
manage to glimpse the British Army, the 
mysterious sea into which all those streams 

[149] 



OYER THERE 



of supply fell and were swallowed up, and 
from which trickled the hundreds of small 

runlets of wounded that con- 
THE ARMY Verged into the mighty stream 
IN BEING of pain at Boulogne. ... I 

passed by a number of wooden 
causeways over water-logged ground and 
each causeway had the name of some London 
street, and at last I was stopped by a com- 
plicated wall of sandbags with many curves 
and involutions. To "dig in" on this par- 
ticular landscape is impracticable, and hence 
the "trenches" are above ground and sand- 
bags are their walls. I looked through a 
periscope and saw barbed wire and the 
German positions. I was told not to stand in 
such-and-such a place because it was ex- 
posed. A long line of men moved about at 
various jobs behind the rampart of sand- 
bags; they were cheerfully ready to shoot, 
but very few of them were actually in the 
posture of shooting. A little further behind 
gay young men seemed to be preparing food. 
Here and there were little reposing places. 
... A mere line, almost matching the sand- 

[150] 



THE BKITISH LINES 



bags in colour! All the tremendous organ- 
isation in the rear had been brought into 
being solely for the material sustenance, the 
direction, and the protection of this line! 
The guns roared solely in its aid. For this 
line existed the clearing stations and hos- 
pitals in France and in Britain. I dare say 
I saw about a quarter of a mile of it. The 
Major in command of what I saw accom- 
panied me some distance along the cause- 
ways into comparative safety. As we were 
parting he said: 

"Well, what do you think of our 
^trenches'?" 

In my preoccupied taciturnity I had per- 
haps failed to realise that, interesting as his 
"trenches" were to me, they must be far 
more interesting to him, and that they ought 
to have formed the subject of conversation. 

"Fine!" I said. 

And I hope my monosyllabic sincerity 
satisfied him. 

We shook hands, and he turned silently 
away to the everlasting peril of his post. 
His retreating figure was rather pathetic to 

[151] 



OVER THERE 



me. Looking at it, I understood for the 
first time what war in truth is. But I soon 
began to wonder anxiously whether our 
automobile would get safely past a certain 
exposed spot on the high road. 



[152] 



CHAPTER SIX 
THE UNIQUE CITY 



CHAPTER VI 

THE UNIQUE CITY 

When we drew near Ypres we met a 
civilian wagon laden with furniture of a 

lower middle-class house, and 
THE also with lengths of gilt pic- 

ENTRANCE turc-framc moulding. There 

was quite a lot of gilt in the 
wagon. A strong, warm wind was blowing, 
and the dust on the road and from the rail- 
way track was very impleasant. The noise 
of artillery persisted. As a fact, the wagon 
was hurrying away with furniture and 
picture-frame mouldings under fire. Several 
times we were told not to Hnger here and not 
to linger there, and the automobiles, emptied 
of us, received very precise instructions 
where to hide during our absence. We saw 
a place where a shell had dropped on to 
waste groimd at one side of the road, and 
thrown up a mass of earth and stones on to 

[ 155 ] 



OVER THERE 



the roof of an asylum on the other side of the 
road. The building was unharmed ; the well= 
paved surface of the road was perfect — it 
had received no hurt ; but on the roof lay the 
earth and stones. Still, we had almost no 
feeling of danger. The chances were a 
thousand to one that the picture-frame 
maker would get safely away with his goods ; 
and he did. But it seemed odd — to an 
absurdly sensitive, non-Teutonic mind it 
seemed somehow to lack justice — that the 
picture-framer, after having been ruined, 
must risk his life in order to snatch from the 
catastrophe the debris of his career. Fur- 
ther on, within the city itself, but near the 
edge of it, two men were removing un- 
injured planks from the upper floor of a 
house; the planks were all there was in the 
house to salve. I saw no other attempt to 
make the best of a bad job, and, after I had 
inspected the bad job, these two attempts 
appeared heroic to the point of mere folly. 
I had not been in Ypres for nearly twenty 
years, and when I was last there the work of 
restoring the historic buildings of the city 

[156] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



was not started. (These restorations, espe- 
cially to the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral 
of St. Martin, were just about finished in 
time for the opening of hostilities, and they 
give yet another proof of the German con- 
tention that Belgium, in conspiracy with 
Britain, had deliberately prepared for the 
war— and, indeed, wanted it !) The Grande 
Place was quite recognisable. It is among 
the largest pubhc squares in Europe, and 
one of the very few into which you could 
put a medium-sized Atlantic liner. There 
is no square in London or (I think) New 
York into which you could put a 10,000-ton 
boat. A 15,000-ton affair, such as even the 
Arabic, could be arranged diagonally in the 
Grande Place at Ypres. 

This Grande Place has seen history. In 
the middle of the thirteenth century, whence 
its chief edifices date, it was the centre of 
one of the largest and busiest towns in 
Europe, and a population of 200,000 
weavers was apt to be uproarious in it. 
Within three centuries a lack of compre- 
hension of home politics and the simple 

[157] 



OYER THERE 



brigandage of foreign politics had reduced 
Ypres to a population of 5000. In the seven- 
teenth century Ypres fell four times. At 
the beginning of the nineteenth century it 
ceased to be a bishopric. In the middle of 
the nineteenth century it ceased to be forti- 
fied; and in the second decade of the twen- 
tieth century it ceased to be inhabited. 
Possessing 200,000 inhabitants in the thir- 
teenth century, 5000 inhabitants in the six- 
teenth, 17,400 inhabitants at the end of the 
nineteenth century, it now possesses in- 
habitants. It is uninhabited. It cannot be 
inhabited. Scarcely two months before I 
saw it, the city — I was told — ^had been full 
of life; in the long period of calm which 
followed the bombardment of the railway- 
station quarter in November, 1914, the in- 
habitants had taken courage, and many of 
those who had fled from the first shells had 
sidled back again with the most absurd hope 
in their hearts. As late as the third week in 
April the Grande Place was the regular 
scene of commerce, and on market-days it 
was dotted with stalls upon which were 

[ 158 ] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



offered for sale such frivolous things as post- 
cards displaying the damage done to the 
railway-station quarter. 

Then came the major bombardment, which 
is not yet over. 

Ajg. jjt s^ ^It d^ 

You may obtain a just idea of the effects 
of the major bombardment by adventuring 
into the interior of the Cathe- 
THE BIG dral of St. Martin. This 
BUILDINGS Cathedral is chiefly thirteenth- 
century work. Its tower, like 
that of the Cathedral at Malines, had never 
been completed — ^nor will it ever be, now — 
but it is still, with the exception of the tower 
of the Cloth Hall, the highest thing in Ypres. 
The tower is a skeleton. As for the rest of 
the building, it may be said that some of the 
walls alone substantially remain. The choir 
— the earliest part of the Cathedral — is en- 
tirely unroofed, and its south wall has van- 
ished. The apse has been blown clean out. 
The Early Gothic nave is partly unroofed. 
The transepts are unroofed, and of the glass 
of the memorable rose window of the south 

[159] 



OVER THERE 



transept not a trace is left — so far as I can 
remember. 

In the centre of the Cathedral, where the 
transepts meet, is a vast heap of bricks, 
stone, and powdery dirt. This heap rises 
irregularly like a range of hills towards the 
choir; it overspreads most of the immense 
interior, occupying an area of, perhaps, from 
15,000 to 20,000 square feet. In the choir it 
rises to a height of six or seven yards. You 
climb perilously over it as you might cross 
the Alps. This incredible amorphous mass, 
made up of millions of defaced architectural 
fragments of all kinds, is the shattered body 
of about half the Cathedral. I suppose that 
the lovely carved choir-stalls are imbedded 
somewhere within it. The grave of Jansen 
is certainly at the bottom of it. The aspect 
of the scene, with the sky above, the jagged 
walls, the interrupted arches, and the dusty 
piled mess all around, is intolerably desolate. 
And it is made the more so by the bright 
colours of the great altar, two-thirds of 
which is standing, and the still brighter 
colours of the organ, which still clings, ap- 

[160] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



parently whole, to the north wall of the 
choir. In the sacristy are collected gilt 
candelabra and other altar-furniture, turned 
yellow by the fumes of picric acid. At a 
little distance the Cathedral, ruin though it 
is, seems solid enough ; but when you are in it 
the fear is upon you that the inconstant and 
fragile remains of it may collapse about you 
in a gust of wind a little rougher than usual. 

You leave the outraged fane with relief. 
And when you get outside you have an ex- 
cellent opportunity of estimating the mech- 
anism which brought about this admirable 
triumph of destruction; for there is a hole 
made by a 17-inch shell; it is at a moderate 
estimate fifty feet across, and it has hap- 
pened to tumble into a graveyard, so that the 
hole is littered with the white bones of earlier 
Christians. 

The Cloth Hall was a more wonderful 
thing than the Cathedral of St. Martin, 
which, after all, was no better than dozens 
of other cathedrals. There was only one 
Cloth Hall of the rank of this one. It is 
not easy to say whether or not the Cloth Hall 

[161] 



OVER THERE 



still exists. Its celebrated three-storey 

facade exists, with a huge hiatus in it to the 

left of the middle, and, of course, minus all 

glass. The entire facade seemed to me to be 

leaning slightly forward ; I could not decide 

whether this was an optical delusion or a 

fact. The enormous central tower is knocked 

to pieces, and yet conserves some remnant 

of its original outlines; bits of scaffolding 

on the sides of it stick out at a great height 

like damaged matches. The slim corner 

towers are scarcely hurt. Everything of 

artistic value in the structure of the interior 

has disappeared in a horrible confusion of 

rubble. The eastern end of the Cloth Hall 

used to be terminated by a small beautiful 

Renaissance edifice called the Niewwerk, 

dating from the seventeenth century. What 

its use was I never knew ; but the ISTiewwerk 

has vanished, and the Town Hall next door 

has also vanished; broken walls, a few bits 

of arched masonry, and heaps of refuse alone 

indicate where these buildings stood in April 

last. 

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 



[162] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



So much for the two principal buildings 
visible from the Grande Place. The Cloth 

Hall is in the Grande Place, and 
THE the Cathedral adjoins it. The 

GRANDE only other fairly large building in 
PLACE the Place is the Hopital de Notre 

Dame at the north-east end. This 
white-painted erection, with its ornamental 
gilt sign, had continued substantially to 
exist as a structural entity; it was defaced, 
but not seriously. Every other building in 
the place was smashed up. To walk right 
round the Place is to walk nearly half a 
mile; and along the entire length, with the 
above exceptions, there was nothing but 
mounds of rubbish and fragments of up- 
standing walls. Here and there in your 
perambulation you may detect an odour with 
which certain trenches have already familiar- 
ised you. Obstinate inhabitants were apt 
to get buried in the cellars where they had 
taken refuge. In one place what looked like 
a colossal sewer had been uncovered. I 
thought at the time that the sewer was some- 
what large for a city of the size of Ypres, 

[163] 



OVER THERE 



and it has since occurred to me that this 
sewer may have been the ancient bed of the 
stream Yperlee, which in some past period 
was arched over. 

"I want to make a rough sketch of all 
this," I said to my companions in the middle 
of the Grande Place, indicating the Cloth 
Hall, and the Cathedral, and other grouped 
ruins. The spectacle was, indeed, majestic 
in the extreme, and if the British Govern- 
ment has not had it officially photographed 
in the finest possible manner, it has failed 
in a very obvious duty ; detailed photographs 
of Ypres ought to be distributed throughout 
the world. 

My companions left me to myself. I sat 
down on the edge of a small shell-hole some 
distance in front of the Hospital. I had been 
advised not to remain too near the building 
lest it might fall on me. The paved floor 
of the Place stretched out around me like 
a tremendous plain, seeming the vaster be- 
cause my eyes were now so much nearer to 
the level of it. On a bit of f a9ade to the left 
the word "Cycle"^ stood out in large, black 

[164] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



letters on a white ground. This word and 
myself were the sole living things in the 
Square. In the distance a cloud of smoke 
up a street showed that a house was burning. 
The other streets visible from where I sat 
gave no sign whatever. The wind, strong 
enough throughout my visit to the Front, 
was now stronger than ever. All the 
window-frames and doors in the Hospital 
were straining and creaking in the wind. 
The loud sound of guns never ceased. A 
large British aeroplane hummed and buzzed 
at a considerable height overhead. Dust 
drove along. 

I said to myself : "A shell might quite well 
fall here any moment." 

I was afraid. But I was less afraid of a 
shell than of the intense loneliness. Rheims 
was inhabited; Arras was inhabited. In 
both cities there were postmen and news- 
papers, shops, and even cafes. But in Ypres 
there was nothing. Every street was a 
desert ; every room in every house was empty. 
Not a dog roamed in search of food. The 
weight upon my heart was sickening. To 

[ 165 ] 



OVER THERE 



avoid complications I had promised the Staff 
Officer not to move from the Place until he 
returned; neither of us had any desire to be 
hunting for each other in the sinister laby- 
rinth of the town's thoroughfares. I was, 
therefore, a prisoner in the Place, con- 
demned to solitary confinement. I ardently 
wanted my companions to come back. . . . 
Then I heard echoing sounds of voices and 
footsteps. Two British soldiers appeared 
round a corner and passed slowly along the 
Square. In the immensity of the Square 
they made very small figures. I had a wish 
to accost them, but Englishmen do not do 
these things, even in Ypres. They glanced 
casually at me; I glanced casually at them, 
carefully pretending that the circumstances 
of my situation were entirely ordinary. 

I felt safer while they were in view; but 
when they had gone I was afraid again. I 
was more than afraid; I was inexplicably 
uneasy. I made the sketch simply because 
I had said that I would make it. And as 
soon as it was done, I jumped up out of the 
hole and walked about, peering down streets 

[166] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



for the reappearance of my friends. I was 
very depressed, very irritable ; and I honestly 
wished that I had never accepted any invi- 
tation to visit the Front. I somehow thought 
I might never get out of Ypres ahve. When 
at length I caught sight of the Staff Officer 
I felt instantly relieved. My depression, 
however, remained for hours afterwards. 

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 

Perhaps the chief street in Ypres is the 
wide Rue de Lille, which runs from opposite 

the Cloth Hall down to the Lille 
STREETS Gate, and over the moat water 

into the Lille road and on to the 
German hnes. The Rue de Lille was espe- 
cially famous for its fine old buildings. 
There was the Hospice Belle, for old female 
paupers of Ypres, built in the thirteenth 
century. There was the Museum, formerly 
the Hotel Merghelynck, not a very striking 
edifice, but full of antiques of all kinds. 
There was the Hospital of St. John, inter- 
esting, but less interesting than the Hospital 
of St. John at Bruges. There was the 
Gothic Maison de Bois, right at the end of 

[167] 



OVER THERE 



the street, with a rather wonderful frontage. 
And there was the famous fourteenth-cen- 
tury Steenen, which since my previous visit 
had been turned into the post office. With 
the exception of this Jast building, the whole 
of the Rue de Lille, if my memory is right, 
lay in ruins. The shattered post office was 
splendidly upright and in appearance entire ; 
but, for all I know, its interior may have 
been destroyed by a shell through the roof. 
Only the acacia-trees flourished, and the flies, 
and the weeds between the stones of the 
paving. The wind took up the dust from 
the rubbish heaps which had been houses 
and wreathed it against what bits of walls 
still maintained the perpendicular. Here, 
too, was the unforgettable odour, rising 
through the interstices of the smashed 
masonry which hid subterranean chambers. 

We turned into a side-street of small 
houses — probably the homes of lace-makers. 
The street was too humble to be a mark for 
the guns of the Germans, who, no doubt, 
trained their artillery by the aid of a very 
large scale municipal map on which every 

[168] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



building was separately indicated. It would 
seem impossible that a map of less than a 
foot to a mile could enable them to produce 
such wonderful results of carefully wanton 
destruction. And the assumption must be 
that the map was obtained from the local 
authorities by some agent masquerading as 
a citizen. I heard, indeed, that known citi- 
zens of all the chief towns returned to their 
towns or to the vicinity thereof in the uni- 
form and with the pleasing manners of 
German warriors. The organisation for 
doing good to Belgium against Belgium's 
will was an incomparable piece of chicane 
and pure rascahty. Strange — Belgians 
were long ago convinced that the visitation 
was inevitably coming, and had fallen into 
the habit of discussing it placidly over their 
beer at nights. . . . 

To return to the side-street. So far as 
one could see, it had not received a dent, not 
a scratch. Even the little windows of the 
little red houses were by no means all broken. 
All the front doors stood ajar. I hesitated 
to walk in, for these houses seemed to be 

[169] 



OVER THERE 



mysteriously protected by influences invis- 
ible. But in the end the vulgar, yet perhaps 
legitimate, curiosity of the sightseer, of the 
professional reporter, drove me within the 
doors. The houses were so modest that they 
had no entrance-halls or lobbies. One passed 
directly from the street into the parlour. 
Apparently the parlours were completely 
furnished. They were in an amazing dis- 
order, but the furniture was there. And the 
furnishings of all of them were alike, as the 
furnishings of all the small houses of a street 
in the Five Towns or in a cheap London 
suburb. The ambition of these homes had 
been to resemble one another. What one 
had all must have. Under ordinary circum- 
stances the powerful common instinct to 
resemble is pitiable. But here it was abso- 
lutely touching. 

Everything was in these parlours. The 
miserable, ugly ornaments, bought and 
cherished and admired by the simple, were 
on the mantelpieces. The drawers of the 
mahogany and oak furniture had been 
dragged open, but not emptied. The tiled 

[170] 







THE TOWER OF THE CLOTH HALL, YPRES 



"The enormous central tower is knocked to pieces 
and yet conserves some remnant of its original ovt- 
lines; bits of scaffolding on the sides of it stick out 
at a great height like damaged matches." [Page 
162] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



floors were littered with clothes, with a 
miscellany of odd possessions, with pots and 
pans out of the kitchen and the scullery, 
with bags and boxes. The accumulations 
of lifetimes were displayed before me, and 
it was almost possible to trace thcslow trans- 
forming of young girls into brides, and 
brides into mothers of broods. 

Within the darkness of the interiors I 
could discern the stairs. But I was held 
back from the stairs. I could get no fur- 
ther than the parlours, though the interest 
of the upper floors must have been sur- 
passing. . . . 

So from house to house. I handled noth- 
ing. Were not the military laws against 
looting of the most drastic character ! And 
at last I came to the end of the little street. 
There are many such streets in Ypres. In 
fact, the majority of the streets were like 
that street. I did not visit them, but I have 
no doubt that they were in the same condi- 
tion. I do not say that the inhabitants fled 
taking naught with them. They must ob- 
viously have taken what they could, and 

[ 171 ] 



OVER THERE 



what was at once most precious and most 
portable. But they could have taken very 
little. They departed breathless without 
vehicles, and probably most of the adults 
had children to carry or to lead. At one 
moment the houses were homes, functioning 
as such. An alarm, infectious like the 
cholera, and at the next moment the deserted 
houses became spiritless, degenerated into 
intolerable museums for the amazement of 
a representative of the American and the 
British Press! Where the scurrying fami- 
lies went to I never even inquired. Useless 
to inquire. They just lost themselves on 
the face of the earth, and were henceforth 
known to mankind by the generic name of 
"refugees" — such of them as managed to get 
away alive. 

After this the solitude of the suburbs, with 
their maimed and rusting factories, their 
stagnant canals, their empty lots, their high, 
lusty weeds, their abolished railway and tram 
stations, was a secondary matter leaving 
practically no impression on the exhausted 
sensibility. 

[172] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



A few miles on the opposite sides of the 
town were the German artillery positions, 
with guns well calculated to destroy Cathe- 
drals and Cloth Halls. Around these guns 
were educated men who had spent years — 
indeed, most of their lives — in the scientific 
study of destruction. Under these men were 
slaves who, solely for the purposes of de- 
struction, had ceased to be the free citizens 
they once were. These slaves were com- 
pelled to carry out any order given to them, 
under pain of death. They had, indeed, 
been explicitly told on the highest earthly 
authority that, if the order came to destroy 
their fathers and their brothers, they must 
destroy their fathers and their brothers : the 
instruction was public and historic. . . . 

The whole organism has worked, and 
worked well, for the destruction of all that 
was beautiful in Ypres, and for the break-up 
of an honourable tradition extending over 
at least eight centuries. The operation was 
the direct result of an order. The order had 
been carefully weighed and considered. The 
successful execution of it brought joy into 

[173] 



OVER THERE 



many hearts high and low. "Another shell 
in the Cathedral!" And men shook hands 
ecstatically around the excellent guns. "A 
hole in the tower of the Cloth Hall." Gen- 
eral rejoicing! "The population has fled, 
and Ypres is a desert!" Inexpressible 
enthusiasm among specially educated men, 
from the highest to the lowest. So it must 
have been. There was no hazard .about the 
treatment of Ypres. The shells did not 
come into Ypres out of nowhere. Each was 
the climax of a long, deliberate effort 
originating in the brains of the responsible 
leaders. One is apt to forget all this. 

"But," you say, "this is war, after all." 
After all, it just is. 

*^e, jSg^ jfe 3i» 

*f* i> "«pf *l* 

The future of Ypres exercises the mind, 
Ypres is only one among many martyrs. 
But, as matters stand at 
THE FUTURE present, it is undoubtedly 
the chief one. In proportion 
to their size, scores of villages have suffered 
as much as Ypres, and some have suffered 
more. But no city of its mercantile, his- 

[174] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



torical, and artistic importance has, up to 
now, suffered in the same degree as Ypres. 
Ypres is entitled to rank as the very symbol 
of the German achievement in Belgium. It 
stood upon the path to Calais; but that was 
not its crime. Even if German guns had 
not left one brick upon another in Ypres, 
the path to Calais would not thereby have 
been made any easier for the well-shod feet 
of the apostles of might, for Ypres never 
served as a military stronghold and could 
not possibly have so served; and had the 
Germans known how to beat the British 
Army in front of Ypres, they could have 
marched through the city as easily as a hyena 
through a rice-crop. The crime of Ypres 
was that it lay handy for the extreme irri- 
tation of an army which, with three times 
the men and three times the guns and thirty 
times the vainglorious conceit, could not 
shift the trifling force opposed to it last 
autumn. Quite naturally the boasters were 
enraged. In the end, something had to give 
way. And the Cathedral and Cloth Hall 
and other defenceless splendours of Ypres 

[175] 



OVER THERE 



gave way, not the trenches. The yearners 
after Calais did themselves no good by ex- 
terminating fine architecture and breaking 
up innocent homes, but they did experience 
the relief of smashing something. Therein 
lies the psychology of the affair of Ypres, 
and the reason why the Ypres of history has 
come to a sudden close. 

In order to envisage the future of Ypres, 
it is necessary to get a clear general concep- 
tion of the .damage done to it. Ypres is not 
destroyed. I should estimate that when I 
saw it in July at least half the houses in it 
were standing entire, and, though disfigured, 
were capable of being rapidly repaired. 
Thousands of the humble of Ypres could 
return to their dwellings and resume home- 
life there with little trouble, provided that 
the economic situation was fairly favourable 
— and, of course, sooner or later the economic 
situation is bound to be favourable, for the 
simple reason that it must ultimately depend 
upon the exertions of a people renowned 
throughout the world for hard and con- 
tinuous industry. 

[176] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



On the other hand, practically all that was 
spectacular in the city, all the leading, all 
the centre round which civic activities had 
grouped themselves for centuries, is de- 
stroyed. Take the Grande Place. If Ypres 
is to persist in a future at all comparable to 
its immediate past (to say nothing of its 
historic past) , the privately owned buildings 
on the Grande Place will, without exception, 
have to be begun all over again, and before 
that task can be undertaken the founda- 
tions will have to be cleared — a tremendous 
undertaking in itself. I do not know how 
many privately owned buildings there were 
on the Grande Place, but I will guess a 
hundred and fifty, probably none of which 
was less than three storeys in height. All 
these buildings belonged to individuals, indi- 
viduals who intimately possessed them and 
counted on them as a source of income or 
well-being, individuals who are now scat- 
tered, impoverished, and acutely discour- 
aged. The same is to be said of the Rue de 
Lille and of other important streets. 

Suppose the Germans back again in the 

[177] 



OVER THERE 



land of justice, modesty, and unselfishness; 
and suppose the property-owners of Ypres 
collected once more in Ypres. The enter- 
prise of reconstruction facing them will 
make such a demand of initiative force and 
mere faith as must daunt the most audacious 
among them. And capital dragged out of a 
bankrupt Germany will by no means solve 
the material problem. For labour will be 
nearly as scarce as money ; the call for labour 
in every field cannot fail to surpass in its 
urgency any call in history. The simple 
contemplation of the gigantic job will be 
staggering. To begin with, the withered 
and corrupt dead will have to be excavated 
from the cellars, and when that day comes 
those will be present who can say: "This 
skeleton was So-and-So's child," "That must 
have been my mother. ..." Terrific hours 
await Ypres. . . . And when (or if) the 
buildings have been re-erected, tenants will 
have to be found for them — and then think 
of the wholesale refurnishing! . . . The 
deep human instinct which attaches men and 
women to a particular spot of the earth's 

[178] 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



surface is so powerful that almost certainly 
the second incarnation of Ypres will be 
initiated, but that it will be carried very far 
towards completion seems to me to be some- 
what doubtful. To my mind the new Ypres 
cannot be more than a kind of camp amid 
the dark ruins of the old, and the city must 
remain for generations, if not for ever, a 
ghastly sign and illustration of what cupid- 
ity and stupidity and vanity can compass 
together when physical violence is their 
instrument. 

The immediate future of Ypres, after the 
war, is plain. It will instantly become one 
of the show-places of the world. Hotels will 
appear out of the ground, guides and touts 
will pullulate at the railway station, the tour 
of the ruins will be mapped out, and the 
tourists and globe-trotters of the whole 
planet will follow that tour in batches like 
staring sheep. Much money will be amassed 
by a few persons out of the exhibition of 
misfortune and woe. A sinister fate for a 
community! Nevertheless, the thing must 
come to pass, and it is well that it should 

[179] 



OYER THERE 



<^ 



<b 



come to pass. The greater the number of 
people who see Ypres for themselves, the 
greater the hope of progress for mankind. 

If the fa9ade of the Cloth Hall can be 
saved, some such inscription as the following 
ought to be incised along the length of it — 

"ON JULY 31sT, 1914, THE GER- 
MAlSr MINISTER AT BRUSSELS 
GAVE A POSITIVE AND SOLEMN 
ASSURANCE THAT GERMANY 
HAD NO INTENTION OF VIO- 
LATING THE NEUTRALITY OF 
BELGIUM. FOUR DAYS LATER 
THE GERMAN ARMY INVADED 
BELGIUM. LOOK AROUND." 

When you are walking through that which 
was Ypres, nothing arouses a stronger feel- 
ing — half contempt, half anger — than the 
thought of the mean, miserable, silly, child- 
ish, and grotesque excuses which the wit of 
Germany has invented for her deliberately 
planned crime. And nothing arouses a 
more grim and sweet satisfaction than the 

[ 180 ] 



- 6 6. 



THE UNIQUE CITY 



thought that she already has the gravest 
reason to regret it, and would give her head 
not to have committed it. Despite all vaunt- 
ings, all facile chatterings about the alleged 
co-operation of an unknowable and awful 
God, all shriekings of unity and power, all 
bellowings about the perfect assurance of 
victory, all loud countings of the fruits of 
victory — the savage leaders of the deluded 
are shaking in their shoes before the antici- 
pated sequel of an outrage ineffable alike 
in its barbarism and in its idiocy. 



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